Architecture from Public to Commons 103239448X, 9781032394480

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ARCHITECTURE FROM PUBLIC TO COMMONS This book provides an urgent framework and collective reflection on understanding ways to reconsider and recast architecture within ideas and politics of the commons and practices of commoning. Architecture from Public to Commons opens with Institutions the dialogue with the scales of the commons, the limits of language for fluid identities, the practices and challenges of architecture as an institution, the design of objects with apparent shared value in Chile, land protocols that explore alternatives to profit-seeking of property in New York, and spirited conversations about revolting against architectural labor from Latin America. Continuing chapters explore, under Territories, the boundaries of Blackness across the Atlantic between Ethiopia and Atlanta, the underground woven network with conflicting grounds of ipê wood between Brazil and the US, water cycles in depleted territories in Chile, indigenous women-led territorial and human rights struggles in Guatemala, climate change accidental commons in California, and the active search for racial justice between design and place in New Orleans. Contributions range from theoretical and historical essays to current case studies of on-the-ground practices in the US, the Middle East, Europe, and Central and South America. Bringing together architects, scholars, artists, historians, sociologists, curators, and activists, this book instils an urgent framework and renewed set of tools to pivot from architecture’s traditional public to a politicized commons. It will greatly interest students, academics, and researchers in architecture, urban design, architectural theory, landscape architecture, political economy, and sociology. Marcelo López-Dinardi is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Texas A&M University. He is interested in the scales of design, the role of the public and commons, and in architecture as an expanded media. He is the editor of Architecture from Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023) and Degrowth (ARQ, 2022). He is working on the project Cemented Dreams: Material and Ecological Stories in Puerto Rico. The project examines the role of cement, architecture, the environment, and politics in the context of colonial Puerto Rico to present day, as a fellow of the Mellon-funded initiative Bridging the Divides: Post Disaster Futures Study Group of CENTRO’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. In 2022, he was nationally elected At-Large Director for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) Board of Directors for 2022–2025. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (cum laude) and a MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices for Architecture from the GSAPP at Columbia University.

ARCHITECTURE FROM PUBLIC TO COMMONS

Edited by Marcelo López-Dinardi

Designed cover image: Gabriel Piovanetti Ferrer, studiopiovanetti First published 2024 by Routledge 4 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 © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Marcelo López-Dinardi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Marcelo López-Dinardi to be identified as the author 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. 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 ISBN: 978-1-032-39448-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39445-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34978-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Prefacevii Andrés Jaque

Introduction: Architecture Under a Commons Lens Marcelo López-Dinardi

1

PART I

Institutions19   1 The Scale of Commons: Thresholds Infrastructures Pelin Tan   2 A Language Act: Making Language with and for Fluid Identities Amira Hanafi   3 Within and Beyond Walls Marina Otero Verzier in conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi   4 Common Goods: Reanimation of Lost Industrial Design Objects in Allende’s Chile Fernando Portal

21

33 51

71

vi Contents

  5 In Land We Trust Nandini Bagchee  6 la mesa, la olla, las hojas: A Conversation on the Revolts of Spatial-Doings Beyond-Against and Beyond Architectural Labor coopia

93

113

PART II

Territories137   7 Black Spatial Intonation Emanuel Admassu

139

  8 Woven Underground, Conflicting Ground Luciana Varkulja

153

  9 Unearthing and Reversing: Exhausting the Water Cycle Linda Schilling Cuellar

178

10 Design in Participatory Justice Processes: The Sepur Zarco Case of Guatemala Elis Mendoza

195

11 The Accidental Commons: Tools for Redistributing Climate Risk Janette Kim

214

12 Design and Justice: Power and Place Bryan C. Lee Jr.

233

PART III

Postface255 13 Making the Public–Commons Marcelo López-Dinardi

257

List of Contributors 268 Index275

PREFACE

What Commons, for What Socialnesses? Demonstrative Activism in Architectural Critical Practices

Commonness produces the social. Commonness produces the social as both relational and material, as constructed and performed. Commons are spatially constituted, materially set, programmatically unfolded. Commons are enacted through and as architecture. They’re never neutral. The account of the commons shows how colonialism, anthropocentrism, racism, hetero-patriarchy, positivism, technocracy, extractivism, and ableism have been intrinsically characterized by how they collaborate with each other. As forces for Enlightenment, the academic discipline and the profession of architecture were founded as engines for hegemony-making. Architecture has worked as a force for coordination, delivering the articulation of territories, bodies, technologies, knowledge, ­practices, and institutions, as the means to accumulate power. But not without resistance, nor without alternative, accident, disobedience, and dissidence. As much a site for hegemony-making, architecture is also (and has been) the site where hegemonies failed and cracked and where they have been ignored, disturbed, and confronted. Architecture is an engine and a force, but it is also the arena where structures of power decay and are subverted. Delineating how the architecture of commonness and the broad spectrum of practices associated with it confront and complicate hegemonies is the focus of this book. Ultimately, this book claims the inseparability of two inquiries: 1. What commons? 2. (For) What socialnesses?

viii Preface

Our present times are shaped by two interconnected processes: The sociopolitical distribution of the possibility for survival; and the extreme engineering and reinvention of life. The intersection of climate and ecological crises—with advanced capitalism; surveillance; and border, biological and digital control— all now regulate how the capacity for human and more-than-human survival is distributed. Destruction of habitats, forced migration, warfare, healthcare sequestration, precarity, and growing disputes of land and resources determine the sacrifizability of human and more-than-human life. This is inseparable from efforts to expand the capacity to selectively design human fertility, health, and longevity; and to scale up and bring constancy into agricultural, stockbreeding, and biomedical production. Situating death and controlling life are terrains where political action is now installed. Politics is now installed in how ­bodies relate to other bodies, how they infiltrate and are infiltrated by microbes and landscapes, climates and technologies, flows and demarcations. Politics is no longer installed in cities, buildings, or interiors but rather in how different ­entities participate in the making of heterogenous togetherness. Commonness is heterogenous commonness. It is the ensemble of the heterogeneous. The ensemble of the heterogenous is in itself a political endeavor. Every ensemble is an assembly. What commons, for what socialnesses? This is the question this book addresses. This convenes a specific mode of inquiry that characterizes a new network of researchers and thinkers gathered in this volume, who are gaining a growing voice in the field of critical architectural practices. If many of their colleagues would claim the history of architecture as their discipline, for the authors this book gathers, the entry point of their inquiries are settings and heterogenous ensembles, not strictly histories. Settings that are relationally constituted and that articulate different times—expanding into past histories, problematic presents, and disputed futures. Where authorship is shared by human and morethan-human interaction. Instead of intentions, it is trajectories, compositions, and participations that are worth tracing. The commons interrogated here are defined by their transitioning in scale, time, physicality, and materiality. They are transscalar, transtemporary, and transmaterial. They operate, for instance, in the way slow geological times affect and are affected by the speedy beat of market transactions, in the interaction between the latency of digital dissemination and the planetary location of data infrastructures. Their work is relational, as the realities they inquire about are relational. There is not much space for critical distancing. For them, research is a form of intervention, truth-setting, and demonstrative activism. Here, criticality is the way to trace how politics are enacted physically, materially, spatially, and programmatically, as much as it is also a way to participate in politics itself. The works gathered here are situated in the cracks of the intersecting systems of segregation. These cracks are where this work exists and grows. And in its growth is the acceleration of its collapse.

Preface  ix

These are architectural critical practices, claiming how architecture is now the arena where structures of power decay and are subverted; and where alternatives and dissidence can be worlded. Andrés Jaque **** Andrés Jaque is Dean and Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His books include Superpowers of Scale, Mies y la Gata Niebla, and Phantom: Mies as Rendered Society.

INTRODUCTION Architecture Under a Commons Lens Marcelo López-Dinardi

It is November 2022. It would be safe to say that almost the entire planet shares an idea of what a pandemic and the Covid-19 virus are, despite some public beliefs about it. Our gigabit-hyper-connected world is filled with the air that enables our existence, the same that allowed the virus to travel from territory to territory and from droplets to nostrils into bodily yet networked respiratory systems. The radical technologies that emerged during the turn of the century and consolidated our planetary enclosure made possible an instant transmission of audiovisual documents of the ongoing biological calamity. Even our psychological selves seem to be more collective than individual. The world appeared to halt for moments, but the incessant apparatus of global capital never stopped pulsating; sadly, people did. It is now evident that our lives are forever entrenched and bound with these polymorphous planetary to biological enclosures. This book departs from exhaustion and isolation and is informed by relational thought;1 the exhaustion of life, bodies, and environments; the burnout culture;2 and the desperate search for compassionate forms of engagement for architecture against the isolation and alienation of our times.3 It also departs from the exhaustion of recurrent ideas about architecture and the concept of the public. It is a response and a proposition, not a forecast or a theory. The book also departs from the undeniable precarity of our existence—the personal and shared, palpable in the climate emergency. It recognizes the urgency for rethinking architecture’s forms of engagement within our planetary enclosures. The convener of these words is trained primarily in architectural design under a Western, dominant, and aspiring idea of architecture. This book project is, however, not a strict reflection on architecture—or architectural examples per se, but a proposal to DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-1

2  Marcelo López-Dinardi

expand, or extend that centuries-old legacy of our work as service to the public, or a public, for that of the commons. Silvia Federici’s and the Midnight Notes Collective’s new enclosures recognized the existence of a system of uprooting workers and their exploitation at a planetary scale since the mid-1970s.4 We now live in the consequences of those large-scale shifts in global extraction, production, consumption, and accumulation with evident roots in the earlier colonial, modern project. I hope I do not need to cite countless books on this. The consequences are undeniable as they are devastating. Today, however, added dimensions have taken control over our so-called biopower. Byung-Chul Han has explored the psychological and nervous system implications of this psychopolitical technologies of power.5 A dominant business ontology and a digitally multiplied finance are omnipresent in the choreographed dance of neurons, logistics, and satellital desires.6 Vast networks of tools bind our existence from bodily cells to celestial matter. From submarineoptical fiber communications cables or fracking the near depths of the millionsyear-old ground formations to orbiting satellites signaling waves back to land or relaying hallucinating images from the beyond times, we make and practice this world every day.7 Architecture is, like many others, one such cultural phenomenon that makes, reproduce, and participate in these multi-scalar choreographies. This multi-scalar fascination is familiar to architectural thought. Our contemporaries have built upon those obsessions. The famous Powers of Ten (1977) from the celebrated Eames couple merged technology and scale into a powerful visual narrative invoking the transformation of our human species—through a man, from cells to planets. Yet, it is still anthropic, after all, this film is centered on the powers of ten in a man’s hand in a city park. More recently, Andrés Jaque and Ivan L. Munuera and the Office for Political Innovation produced The Transscalar Architecture of Covid-19, a visual tour de force of the impact of the pandemic on an already exhausted planet.8 These works are evidencing atomic and infrastructural size connections between bodies and planetary scale elements. The inevitability of trans-scalar thought. Both audiovisual works attempt to bridge the scales of our relational life as subjects of the planet and in the planet. A Note on the Public

The public, in its multiple forms, has officially represented the figure of our idealized collective and the body politic where it is manifested. This nomenclature is born from its association with the participants of nation-states—and the ones at the margins of or expulsed from and, in principle, with democratic systems. The commons, on the contrary, has one origin in the definition of property and the enclosure of land in early 17th century England, while other definitions align with earthly resources available and understood as shared goods. Both scenarios present, as briefly suggested earlier, the problem of the organization of social

Introduction  3

life in a collective manner, or in its institutional forms including language. It also introduces the question, under a broad public rubric, of the management of such resources, and their territorial implications. But today there are additional pressures built over the past five decades of development of the neoliberal doctrine. One critique of the neoliberal rationale and its consequences of life as an economic regime was built on the atomization of the public and the alienation of its members. In doing so, it has challenged the existence of collective forms of the body politic in its various manifestations including cities. Wendy Brown has theorized this bodily fragmentation as an affront to the “basis of democratic citizenry” and, in consequence, a crisis of “political sovereignty” in the act of “undoing the demos.”9 The demos figure here is not dissimilar to Hannah Arendt’s body of the public—this is the subjects that make the people in the space of a democratic society. In Brown’s discussion, it is inevitable not to see the parallel of the construction of sovereignty through a primarily Westerncentered articulation of the public in its traditional nomenclature of a people of a place, a city, or a nation-state who shape a democratic system. While pointing this—and even in agreement with Brown’s claim of the threat to current forms of democracy at the hands of the homo oeconomicus, I am suggesting to bypass— suspend the correlation of this understanding of people and the concept of the public. However, I am hoping for an expanded reading of architecture’s role in engaging the traditional idea of the public, given the diversity of elements we pledge within its production. Although the scope of these words is far from entering into a direct conversation with those of Brown and others, the dyad body-politic situates the public and its place of appearance at the center—a phenomena familiar to architecture. As such, the political dimension of the concepts of public will always find a wall as their theorization is inevitably bound by the nation-state, its subjects, and its protocols. In that equation, the primary construction of its constituents relies on the public’s exhausted, depleted, and incomplete conception for today’s world. In addition, as architectural historian Reinhold Martin’s words, Publics and Common(s) suggests, these proto-democratic societies were built upon exclusionary, exploitative, or extractive practices. The commons are proposed here as a concept from political theory that, in an extension to its form in that field, could arguably, serve as a lens that complements the public in architecture to redirect it to a non-demos, non-nation-state centered form. A broader definition of the commons is brought here as a lens for architecture, not as a substitution for the political in the concept of the public. The epistemology of what is public in architecture in its “pre-modern” and modern versions is strictly aligned with the Western model that originated in ancient Greece and extrapolated to the modern project of nation-states. For decades, this notorious model recreated ad infinitum has insisted on reinstating a notion of public associated with those concepts of people and space. However, it is

4  Marcelo López-Dinardi

not significantly discussed that even in ancient times, these spaces and the protodemocratic societies our world is built upon were exclusionary from the beginning. Not only exclusionary of women and enslaved subjects but of a pluriverse of cosmovisions pertaining to our short millennia of existence as species. The proposal of architecture from public to commons does not intend to substitute the politics of the architect or the politics of architecture. Instead, its main aim is to overcome the representational paradigm embodied in it—and the conundrum it creates in architecture, to pave the way for relational forms of engagement between bodies, species, materials, protocols, scales, histories, languages, and a multiplicity of elements that, following Arturo Escobar and others, offer the possibility of a pluriverse beyond a dominant Western humanism.10 This representational paradigm has subjected architectural discourse in many forms, including the city as its traditional site, and similar to the exhaustion of the concept of the public, its limits are at direct odds with a transition to a nondemos planetary consciousness. The City, Urban Commons

Practitioners and scholars have long engaged with the urban commons as a site and form of resistance to the struggles manifested in those spaces particularly as the embodied forms of capitalist accumulation. The defense for a just and inclusive place inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s Le Droit à la Ville from 1968 and cultivated by geographer David Harvey and many others articulate the city as the site for resources and access making the city your own, a commons. Stavros Stavrides, one of the key thinkers of commons within architecture, recognizes the role of cities as the urban orders of capitalist reproduction and the limits of notions of public and private space. In his book The City as Commons, he offers the idea of commons space as a rubric to pursue a renewed idea of the city. He writes, “Common space can be considered as a relation between a so-called group and its efforts to define a world that is shared between its members.”11 Still useful and active, this principle seems to rely primarily on Arendt’s notion of the space of appearance, and in the analogy she used for the table.12 A critical distinction from this project from public to commons to that of the urban commons or the city commons is the invitation to expand the definition of, in Stavrides roles, its members. This book project also proposes to move away from the concept of world to that of planet, or earth, in doing so, expanding the repertoire of elements and members beyond ideas of urbanization. What constitutes the commons? Who participates in it? I  would suggest it is not only a question of who but also what its members or elements are, a key bridge to think about architecture. These questions emerge here in the context of planetary urbanization and ask us to, even when operating in these environments—megalopolis, towns, or rural villages, to consider the relational

Introduction  5

quality of human and non-human, ecological, and cultural (social) phenomena, beyond their scope of place. Although locality will continue to be a critical tool to approach our work, it will benefit from a more extensive understanding of the relational nature of our planetary existence. In this book, architecture, as seen through a commons lens, does not preclude nor frame the commons as a form based on urban practices but considers it one such mode of it. The texts included here and this proposition extend an invitation to decenter the city as a site. It prefers the language of ecology, habitats, cycles, ecosystems, environments, more than that of the urban realm, particularly when understood as a whole. The concept of the city encompasses so much that a commons lens may help see and identify processes and territories that overlap more than through usual definitions. In a significant way, this asks us to directly consider the scale of the elements that participate in architecture. The elements of the architecture of the building, but also in the architecture of our relations, habitats, technologies, and indeed our education. Without stepping too much into the city or urban field for too long, the binaries of urban-rural, urban dweller-peasants, and educated-non-educated have forced us to construct the peoples of these territories subjected to them reproducing the pitfalls of the modern project as visible in urban form. There is no question about the role of the city as a site of capitalist reproduction, labor exploitation, and accumulation, but it is ever more becoming a limited trope for the entangled and dislocated nature of our planetary relations and extractive practices. All forms of urbanization, a modern heritage product, were possible because of the non-urban conditions of the sites of resources extraction—think about food, materials, energy, these sites can be understood, even if momentarily, as exo-urban spaces, since the larger product they make is not grains or fruits or petroleum or gas, but cities and commerce and logistics. Even if cities are an illustrative and material legacy of colonial societies, reflecting on them as a site keeps re-centering them as an entity that, in theory, could be resolved.13 From public to commons, ask us to reconsider this phenomenon if we plan to transition to a non-destructive, non-extractive form of planetary life at all ends of the supply, logistics, and imaginary chains. A Commons Lens

The word architecture is in the title of this book as a departing point, not a contention figure. It is not a retreat from it, nor a tool guide.14 Architecture remains here as a subject that needs to be both continued to be practiced yet undone through and in dialogue with what is proposed as a commons lens. Architecture is plural enough to follow a single canon. The word from speaks of a transition and a traveled road. Here, from public to commons is both. In times of urgent paradigmatic transitions, it is a transition of ideas associated with the concept of

6  Marcelo López-Dinardi

the public to the concept of the commons. It is also a road that offers the opportunity to look back and look forward to articulating ideas for architecture. Readers can situate themselves in this transition or any part of a narrow or wide road. The proposition is to recognize our atomized existence on a planetary scale. It is not a dividing or fragmenting political project but a dialogue of scales, territories, and beings—a pluriverse within our universe of ideas. One aspect to highlight from the roads traveled are the formats of work that have challenged an individual-benefit output. These models are associated with cooperative, mutual aid, and spatial and care practices.15 All have explored, past and present, collective forms of association with direct consequences in social, cultural, and environmental relations. The lens for the commons proposed here is inclusive of these modes of practice and considers them part of the realm of ideas in direct dialogue with a commons sensibility. Spatial practices, mainly, have served for decades as a method and space for working in dialogue with architectural issues bridging worlds. Supported by the earlier ideas of the 1995 volume Spatial Practices16 to the multiple projects and practices interweaving a beyond-architectural notion of space and place, these forms of engagements have allowed relational exchanges to emerge. In addition, the ideas of participatory practices that emerged during the late 1960s as questioning and critique of architecture and urban planning play a significant role in shaping the commons sensibility explored in these pages. The commons are not like architecture or the public since they have not been appropriated entirely by ideologies coerced onto them—not even communism, even if it sounds like it. Commons are still a concept perceived as exogenous to architecture, not invisible, yet foreign. The commons in this book are problematized by their various forms and definitions as land act and ownership that emerged from the English case, as natural resources believed to have a shared benefit, to micro-practices of sovereignty and decentralized governing, to the act of practicing the commons or commoning. But why the commons for architecture? One crucial fact to consider about the commons is the root of its definition before the Inclosure Acts began in 1604 England since it served as a precedent for privatizing and exploiting land as a resource. This land protocol became one of the major underpinnings of the development of the colonial project and its implementation at a global scale. From where I write, the United States of America combined this practice of appropriating land as property and embraced it as a model to develop its original power by displacing, erasing its native inhabitants, and making people property through the enslavement of African people. The model of property and privatization became one of the predominant models for life since the world power’s colonization project, with significant consequences in its newest forms today. In this longer arc of time, the idea of an environmental resource shared for everyday sustenance was negated with the

Introduction  7

practice of property, extraction, production, and accumulation in primarily capitalist societies—even the forced ones that are perhaps the majority. Although the socialist experiment led by the Soviet Union promised a form of commonality, their implementation failed to reproduce collectivity without power domination and oppression and perhaps contributed to a non-capitalist form of a neoliberal regime.17 Today, these centuries-old variations of enclosures act upon one another from land, to buildings, to bodies, to neurons. The reasoning for the commons as suspended of ideological connotations motivates its use in this project. It does not suggest, as it may immediately seem, to depoliticize the commons or architecture, but it does aim to ask, can a commons lens serve as an alternative architectural imaginary instead of the exhausted lens of the original demos and the polis? Far removed from the time of agoras and exclusive nation-states, the production of architecture—and its education, can find in the broad spectrum of a commons imaginary renewed alternatives to conceive projects and practices based on non-extractive cultures. What does an architectural commons knowledge look like when it is not limited to its contemporary form of property satisfaction? How can the commons help becoming a pluriverse of cosmovisions beyond a public? I will briefly elaborate on this idea through the work of two key thinkers of the commons, Silvia Federici and Elinor Ostrom. In a short book entry, Federici asks, The University: A Knowledge Common? It questions the university’s role as a center of knowledge production, boundaries, sources, and belonging. In her known emphasis on a women’s reproductive work lens, she interrogates the space of the university and what our idea of knowledge is if we are interested in a knowledge commons.18 We need to question the material conditions of the production of a university, its history, and its relation to the surrounding communities. Especially in the U.S., where so much of the land used by institutions was appropriated following the bloody dispossession of its former inhabitants, such a reckoning is essential. We must also change our conception of what knowledge is and who can be considered a knowledge producer. Currently, knowledge production on the campuses is insulated from the broad infrastructural work that sustains academic life, which requires a multiplicity of subjects (cleaners, cafeteria workers, groundkeepers, etc.) making it possible for students and teachers to return to the classroom every day. Yet, like women’s reproductive work, this work too is mostly invisible. There are two critical affirmations I want to highlight for us to consider. One is the need to expand knowledge production forms and subjects, for architecture, including its material conditions, from the space of the university and the

8  Marcelo López-Dinardi

academies. This work should not be limited, as it is happening now, to grassroots groups doing on-ground work on the margins or as an exception, nor should it be subjected to professional industries. This task, more than ever, is crucial to validate architectural education—even as resistance, in the context of the neoliberalization of the universities and their research models.19 The other aspect of Federici that I want to highlight is her understanding of systems of reproduction. Learning from her work conceived through women’s reproduction and care, these practices manifest the work and labor, done daily, repeatedly, as infrastructure. Architecture significantly participates in the reproduction of daily life and would benefit from an intersectional reading of the agents (human and nonhumans) and elements (ecological and material) that are transformed into their products. Recognizing architecture’s infrastructural quality and its impact not as a singularity but as commonality can aid the way we shape up lessons and strategies to assemble it. The work of Ostrom is the other I would briefly elaborate on. In her influential book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), she problematizes the commons through empirical field research and the collective management of common-pool resources (CPR). She studied cases associated with land proprietorship, water extraction, and fisheries. One aspect of her extensive research is the acknowledgment of the independent variables of each case, tested among others with the use of games to articulate ­decision-making processes.20 In these cases, neither policy nor theory alone could absorb the specificities of each case or consider all the variables emerging from a single scenario. Emerging from political sciences and the economy, her work focused on organizational networks and their relational conditions for managing CPRs. Architecture has historically focused on the end product or either end—the before and after the implementation of architectural products. This is not to say that architecture is not full of organizational complexes or networked relations; on the contrary, its processes are more obscured and backgrounded than the foreground representation that characterizes it in its buildings. However, one may ask, can an independent-variables, relational model proven successful in a commons analysis be appropriated for architecture, where the focus is as much on the relation of elements as the end product as one more element on a larger and longer chain of events? Questions of expertise threaten knowledge fields every day with a combination of dissolution or enhancement. However, in architecture, expertise has signified questionable disciplinary knowledge on one side or technical know-how on the other. In both cases, each of them treated as secluded, exclusionary, and institutionalized forms fail to account for Ostrom’s observed, documented variables in a commons-based framework. Ostrom’s ideas can be read as inherently relational, multiple, with special attention and care to the direct interactions of elements at play. Can architecture benefit from a commons lens whose principles

Introduction  9

are relational, based on exchanges, and expand the focus of subjects-advantage to everyday wellbeing? From Public to Commons

It is no surprise to recognize that the category of the public is insufficient to accommodate the bodies, elements, histories, and scales of our entangled lives. From modernity’s nation-state project in its multiple ideological forms to their imaginary in ancient Greece, the public was an exclusive body, spaces, and places that supported their constitution. Architecture, as we know, was vital in shaping, articulating, and constructing these forms of life based on an audience, the public. Eventually, apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, train stations, libraries, and court houses, were all part of the ensemble of architectural projects that aimed to shape the public. For decades—if not centuries, the myth of public space served as an equalizer for life, or to be specific, for the appearance of public life. A hegemonic world based on Western humanism was shaped by these dominant forms. Arendt’s The Human Condition became a helpful tool in formulating categories for these rather abstract principles, the public realm, the space of appearance, the private, and the commons. Martin reviews these categories and asserts their scope and limits.21 “For Arendt,” writes Martin, “the polis constitutes a ‘space of appearance,’ in which being-in-public, or ‘publicity,’ is effectively synonymous with politics. More than simply a public square or forum, the space of appearance is potentially ubiquitous.” Architecture’s engagement with Arendt’s work is significantly rooted in the origination of public life in the fact or myth of the Greek polis. For too long, architecture positioned itself aligned with the Western civilizatory pre-modern project on cities that forcibly evolved through the industrial revolution and found in the city the site from where to articulate their struggles. From public to commons does not pretend to negate this condition but is interested in complicating its legacies to find renewed forms of engagement for architecture in our contemporary culture. Moreover, to be sure, consider architecture a form of engagement in the world beyond an end product. Martin’s text perceptively discusses the correlation of the category of the public in dialogue with the work of Jürgen Habermas, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Nancy Fraser, and David Harvey. I will not rehearse that conversation here but will highlight a few notes important for this project. Martin agrees with the “exhaustion” of the category of the public and is interested in this discussion as a dialogue between political theory and form, the city, its protocols, and the state as a medium. By claiming the state as a ruined infrastructure, he asks if these ruins “might be reappropriated as media, or as fragments of a media system, in which life-in-common can take place.” This underpinning claim of Martin’s text situates the dialogue among the authors and the public commons as

10  Marcelo López-Dinardi

a system framed under the historical lens of the nation-state, its institutions, and its main scenarios—namely the city, or the metropolis, and a Marxist reading of relations between labor and production, even with differing projections. In addition, Martin finds the conception of communication intrinsically close to the commons and asks Hardt and Negri if the realms of public and private— following their insufficiency, are to be replaced by a networked commons, “what will replace these mediators?” He follows by pointing to a shared critique of Hard and Negri and Habermas, saying, In this sense Hardt and Negri’s common is subject to criticisms analogous to those that have been leveled at Habermas’s version of the public sphere. Not that it homogenizes otherwise heterogeneous subjectivities or submits them to the rule of an arbitrary norm; but rather that in subsuming the dyad singularity/multiplicity into a common, non-homogeneous substrate, it potentially underestimates the differentials, interferences, and asymmetries comprising that substrate’s communicative infrastructures. The intersectional discussion between political theory and its spaces and agents is glossed by an insistence on seeing infrastructure as a medium. As such, the arguments are shaped towards reframing the concept of infrastructure as an apparatus, namely an urban apparatus.22 This book aims to situate the commons, and its political theory discussion, beyond its conception of an intrinsically urban system, including an apparatus. In doing so, it does not propose to negate or override the vast literature and practice of the urban as a contested scenario but to limit its implications as a concept that defines the possibility of a whole. It follows the long-standing critique of the public as a category utilized in architectural thought to define collectives and shared resources or spaces. Primarily, the work collected here proposes to see the commons not strictly as a political system but as a lens that can aid in negotiating at multiple scales the differentials, interferences, and asymmetries, not only of Martin’s communicative infrastructures but to all infrastructures—in shape or ruined, of the multi-scalar elements of our planetary life. In doing so, I would argue for architecture’s reduction—or suspension of the concept of the public and to explore a commons lens in a transition for an architecture from public to commons. A lens as a way of seeing, finding, and feeling the planet, a planet we are of not in. The Scale of Commons

This book recognizes the emerging work of colleagues from scholars to designers and all who flow between critically engaging with our shared issues and trying to find ways to creatively navigate life on a fatigued planet. A key group

Introduction  11

of people have been involved with commons sensibilities in Europe, particularly Germany. Among them, the work of Raumlabor from Berlin and others have explored questions of land ownership, housing, ecology, and design in their respective scenarios. Notably, the Floating University project embodies with critical imagination the possible worlds we still need to create.23 The publishing and curatorial work of dpr-barcelona and their respective collaborations with others, including the Urban Commons Handbook or the Adhocracy: From Making Things to Making the Commons exhibition in Athens (curated alongside Pelin Tan), have served as a reference to see how in those contexts these ideas have been put in practice or conceptualized.24 Another careful work confronting design and the commons is hosted in the pages of an ARCH+ journal issue titled An Atlas of Commoning: Places of Collective Production.25 Primarily through the lessons of those projects and applied scenarios, the volume explores multiple practices engaging with urban commons. In the context of the U.S., it is just beginning to emerge as a topic of discussion. Notable examples are the recent exhibition, Reset: Towards a New Commons at the Center for Architecture26 in New York City, or the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 111th Annual Meeting titled In Commons.27 Others, like Jose Sanchez, have explored the connection of the commons with the tools and frameworks of digital systems and platforms.28 Following the longer arc of questions of a transition from public to commons, this book tries to, perhaps more reflectively, consider an intersectional reading of the commons in architecture in addition to implementing these ideas. It proposes two overall themes in a general order to account for the diversity and geographic differences of its contributions. The book is organized under two broad themes, Institutions and Territories. Within them, diverse voices tell a story, share case studies, converse, document, or explore situations introduced here under a commons framework. The texts are not strictly departing from the commons existing literature. They are collected here through a commons lens for architecture to consider them. Given the relational dialogue of the voices included, this project is an unconventional collection. Ideally, we may seek alternatives for individual and collective challenges in a plethora of scenarios, lessons, and reflections emerging from these words. This book is ideally expansive, a collection of texts from authors within and outside the traditional field of architecture; it is not an architectural history anthology. It combines voices who work with words, images, spaces, exhibitions, or communities. The word voices here is not only to appeal to an individual in a collection, but to acknowledge that the works gathered here allow their authors to directly manifest their stories, with the support of bibliographical references, life-experience, or design or artistic work. Implicit in this assemblage is the aspiration to an intersectional dialogue not intended to dissolve expertise but to bridge and open forms of engagement that expand on it. The work is scholarly, argumentative, speculative, and directive. Following the two spacious

12  Marcelo López-Dinardi

themes organizing the book, under institutions fall the texts that seek to interrogate this concept with relation to architecture itself, with language and identity, the thresholds and scales of the practice of instituting, the design of institutional goods, collective organization, and questions of bodily autonomy. In territories, the texts engage with planetary racial narratives past and present, with environmentally contested sites, with indigenous and human rights territorial conflicts, land and property, with the neighborhood scale of climate accidents and opportunities, and the grounds for racial justice through design practices. Overall, these works are intended to support the possibility of architectures of transitions from public to commons, from world to planet, from extraction to care. Although organized in a sequence, the reader may desire to flip back and forth and find additional connections. Institutions begin with an overview and direct focus on the practice of commoning by Pelin Tan, who has participated and engaged in forms of commoning for years now. Her text offers the opportunity to open a discussion of the scale of the commons, or thresholds, that will serve as a framework for the whole volume. Tan’s work comes from sociology and art practices in territories ranging from Turkey to Palestine and opens the relational dynamics of politics, space, and culture. We then travel to perhaps further away from the exact field of architecture to examine the impact of language in articulating an expansive project from public to commons. The work of poet and artist Amira Hanafi considers language as a material and invites us to contest the role of the body politic of the state in defining the language that governs us. Namely, the language in which this book is written. It questions which are “us” in the context of the H.R. Bill 997 of the United States Congress that intends to make English the official language of the country. Through an open invitation to people to rewrite the bill in as many languages are spoken in Turtle Island, or the North American territory, the text recognizes the extent to which we must expand our vocabulary, as well as our communication models beyond the hegemonic tendency of a world conceived of in one idiom. The section follows with an honest reflection on the intense work within architectural institutions that Marina Otero Verzier has done over the last decade. Her commitment to exercising institutional alternatives and studying them allowed for a charged discussion of what is to practice within and outside their walls. It inevitably departs, however, with the acknowledgment of architecture as one such institution and edifice reproduced in museums, archives, or educational spaces. These three contributions set the framing for how to read the following pages as thresholds, transitions, and intersectional languages. To follow the discussion, we move to a promising work of a collective project of a statebacked design through the work of Fernando Portal and the inquiry of the life of everyday design objects conceived during the brief experiment of socialism in Chile with Salvador Allende. A convoluted story of forgotten blueprints, design ideas, ideological aspirations, and common goods, the text illustrates one face

Introduction  13

of a project that, through anonymous subjects—institutional anonymity in this case, attempted to produce objects beyond their commodity value with a commons, shared purpose. The following two texts elaborate on alternative modes of thinking ideas of land property and propriety through various neighborhood projects on one side and with a manifesto-like paranormal conversation-play between original authors and a Latin American group of multidisciplinary voices. First, Nandini Bagchee takes us on a journey of community-based work and the processes involved— with her own practice contributions, to contest the land property ownership model through the community land trust (CLTs) model. The work explores case studies in the context of New York City and exposes the challenges and opportunities of such model in the current battlefield to afford a decent place to live. Then, coopia, a multidisciplinary group gathering people from Abya Yala including Perú, Colombia, and México, engage in an active discussion, or revolt, of resistance and actions against architectural labor, against the rule of property and exploitation. In an imagined conversation between influential authors and their voices, they explore and argue the challenges of revolting and spatial-doings to think of architecture outside its primarily capitalist reproductive model. Spirited—in all senses and directive in tone, it concludes by pushing us aside from any form of institutional thinking that is not autonomous or anti-hegemonic. The territories section begins with a personal and profound reflection of life built across continents in specific spatial conditions characteristic of their locations between Addis Ababa and Atlanta. This work, led by Emanuel Admassu from AD-WO, investigates the transformation of land and human relations in the context of the Ethiopian Ghebbi and suburban Atlanta passing through the scar of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, all as sites of Blackness. Here, land, seas, and bodies are interrogated as historical and current elements of one planetary scale transformation. This work is followed by, in contrast to the distance between oceans, the density of the Amazonian Rainforest. Luciana Varkulja delves into the practices associated with extracting ipê wood in the Brazilian Amazon. A material known for its strong weathering capacities long used in boardwalks in the United States for over a century, has become a precious element given its strength to harsh climates, creating, on the contrary, a weakened ecology for a rainforest system under threat of unconscious extraction, corruption, politics, and complicated voids of logistical chains. Linda Schilling Cuellar grounds us on the Chilean coast of Los Vilos in the country’s central region and narrates the logic around water infrastructures and the misfortunes of that model in the experimental territory of neoliberal policies. In a place known for its geography and landscape, this project explores the dying commons of resources by inserting the complex operations of “public” benefit with extractive and exclusive accumulation. Failed sea-platforms for water salinization background the struggles for access to resources crucial to sustain

14  Marcelo López-Dinardi

the region’s life. Further north in the continent and occupying a stretch of land that connects north and south commonly referred to as Central America, Elis Mendoza narrates the harrowing story of the events around Sepur Zarco, Guatemala. Her project combines a profound engagement with the Q’eqchi indigenous women and the patterns of structural violences they were subjected to in their own land. The text recounts the decades-long process of personal, social, and ecological healing and the legal fights in which a spatial practices work of forensic documentation and registration allowed them to succeed in court. Taking us back to the familiar territories of urban scenarios, Janette Kim deeply engages with communities, actors, and lands that are subject to the climate crisis’s sway. Her work directly considers commons and commoning practices in two urban and landscape design scenarios that, following the tradition of Elinor Ostrom, produces a game to facilitate, experiment, and visualize the complex relations of individual versus collective benefit. In this process, the accidental commons emerge as a trope for examining the powerful local impact of the planetary climate emergency and the politics of dissent and agonism. Lastly, and in continuation with exploring the role of design justice in racially and socially contested territories, Bryan C. Lee Jr. argues that the built environment is a documentarian, a witness, and share his life experience supported with the work he leads at Colloqate Design from New Orleans, US, and the charge dynamics of power and place. The commons lens validates this experience by projecting the direct connection between people and their communities with the land they call home. In many cases, these projects build upon the centuries of Blackness formation that have rooted this side of the Atlantic and still struggle today for a safe and just environment. The book’s postface summarizes the project that preceded this book, when its original ambition was to, before having developed the transitional ideas from public to commons, struggled to define the scope and limits of the former and the opportunities of the less subject-centered commons. This project, in a desperate act of creating connections and relations with colleagues worldwide during the deep stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Making the Public–Commons created an installation and a ten-non-stop hours conversations marathon forming a temporary trance space for relational exchange. Lastly, this book is built upon years of testing and exploring the concepts of public and commons in different formats. First, my own work inquiring artarchitectural practices contesting the sites and location of architecture, engaging design, and urban sites in disenfranchised contexts, or the spatial implication of debt and colonial legacies. In addition, I  have exchanged these ideas through architecture studios and an emerging commons consciousness in the field of architecture. Hopefully, the voices, case studies, and ideas presented here can stimulate a continuous engagement with rich and potential multi-scalar architectural challenges we must embrace with critical imagination for a sensible and joyful planetary life.

Introduction  15

Notes 1 Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Duke University Press, 2017), www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11smgs6. 2 Byung-Chul Han and Erik Butler, The Burnout Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Byung-Chul Han and Erik Butler, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London: Verso, 2017). 3 Marcelo López-Dinardi, Jimmy Bullis, and Pouya Khadem, “Forms of Engagement: In Conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi,” PLAT, August 30, 2021, www.­ platjournal.com/ninepointfive/in-conversation-with-marcelo-lopez-dinardi. 4 Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM, 2019), 28. 5 See note 2. 6 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Alresford: Zer0 Books, 2022); Franco Berardi, “Cognitarian Subjectivation,” e-flux Journal 20 (November 2010), www.e-flux.com/journal/20/67633/cognitarian-subjectivation/. 7 The references appeal to the physical submarine wiring of the internet, the fossil fuel extraction practices, the multiplicity of satellites in space including the Worldview satellite by Google, and the recent composite images of the James Webb Space Telescope by NASA. 8 Andrés Jaque and Ivan Munuera, “The Transscalar Architecture of COVID-19,” in The World Around: Architecture’s Now (2020), https://theworldaround.com/. 9 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2020). 10 See Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Arturo Escobar, “Reframing Civilization(s): From Critique to Transition,” ARQ (Santiago), no. 111 (2022): 24–41, https://doi.org/10.4067/ s0717-69962022000200024; Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 11 Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons (London: Zed Books, 2016), 54. 12 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 52. 13 See, for example, Pier Vittorio Aureli’s attempt to conceptualize this phenomenon in Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 14 There is an emerging scholarly work directly compiling and exploring architectural design and adjacent practices under the theme of the commons, see An Atlas of Commoning by Stefan Gruber, Commoning the City: Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics and Ethics by Derya Özkan and Güldem Baykal Büyüksaraç, or The Architecture of the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms by Jose Sanchez. 15 See, for example, the Critical Spatial Practices book series by Sternberg Press, www. sternberg-press.com/series/critical-spatial-practice-series/ 16 See Helen Liggett and David C. Perry, eds., Spatial Practices (London: Sage Publications, 1995). 17 See Fritz Bartel, The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022). 18 Robert Lee, “See the Reference of the United States Land Grant Universities Origin,” Landgrabu.org, High Country News, 2020, www.landgrabu.org/. 19 See in addition Reinhold Martin, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021);

16  Marcelo López-Dinardi

Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, Race and Modern Architecture a Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). 20 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–28. 21 Reinhold Martin, “Public and Common(s),” Places Journal (January 2013), accessed November 23, 2022, https://doi.org/10.22269/130124. 22 Reinhold Martin, The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 23 For more on this project see https://floating-berlin.org. 24 For the work of dpr-barcelona and the commons see https://dpr-barcelona.com/tag/ commons/ 25 For more on the ARCH+ journal, in English see https://archplus.net/en/english-publi cations/an-atlas-of-commoning/ and German see https://archplus.net/de/ausgabe/232/. 26 For more on the exhibition see www.centerforarchitecture.org/exhibitions/reset/ 27 For more on the Annual Meeting see www.acsa-arch.org/conference/111th-annualmeeting/ 28 See Jose Sanchez, Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms (London: Routledge, 2021).

References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Bartel, Fritz. The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. Berardi, Franco. “Cognitarian Subjectivation.” e-flux Journal 20 (November  2010). www.e-flux.com/journal/20/67633/cognitarian-subjectivation/. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2020. Cheng, Irene, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson. Race and Modern Architecture a Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Escobar, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Escobar, Arturo. “Reframing Civilization(s): From Critique to Transition.” ARQ (Santiago), no. 111 (2022): 24–41. https://doi.org/10.4067/s0717-69962022000200024. Federici, Silvia, and Peter Linebaugh. Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland, CA: PM, 2019. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Alresford: Zero Books, 2022. Han, Byung-Chul, and Erik Butler. The Burnout Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Han, Byung-Chul, and Erik Butler. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London: Verso, 2017.

Introduction  17

Jaque, Andrés, and Ivan Munuera. “The Transscalar Architecture of COVID-19.” In The World Around: Architecture’s Now, 2020. https://theworldaround.com/. Lee, Robert. “See the Reference of the United States Land Grant Universities Origin.” Landgrabu.org. High Country News, 2020. www.landgrabu.org/. López-Dinardi, Marcelo, Jimmy Bullis, and Pouya Khadem. “Forms of Engagement: In Conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi.” PLAT, August 30, 2021. www.platjournal.com/ninepointfive/in-conversation-with-marcelo-lopez-dinardi. Martin, Reinhold. “Public and Common(s).” Places Journal (January 2013). Accessed November 23, 2022. https://doi.org/10.22269/130124. Martin, Reinhold. The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Martin, Reinhold. Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Stavrides, Stavros. Common Space: The City as Commons. London: Zed Books, 2016.

PART I

Institutions

1 THE SCALE OF COMMONS Thresholds Infrastructures Pelin Tan

This chapter argues that the role of architecture and design in supporting commoning practices depends on parameters such as scales, trans-local knowledge, levels of precariousness, and uneven spatial conditions. The concept of the commons is vital in discussing design pedagogies and epistemologies in the context of thinking of architecture from public to commons. The term was primarily introduced in the 1970s as a discussion on managing natural resources, however, after the influencing impacts of the Occupy movements from New York to Istanbul and Hong Kong, the term became familiar to use in relation to spatial design—and spatial practices and bottom-up anti-capitalist community involvements. For architect and urbanist Stavros Stavrides, urban commons happen in the sites of struggles and movements for people and land rights. Meanwhile, collective action, heterogeneous labor conditions, and ethics of locality are often described by the economist feminist geographer J.K. Gibson-Graham, who widens the practice and discussion on commoning practices as collective actions. This chapter will focus on the spatial discourse of commoning, designing the scale of commons and architecture, precarious conditions, and indigenous worlding in building threshold infrastructures. The chapter will attempt to answer the questions by George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici: What is anti-capitalist commoning? How can we build commoning practices that reveal urban struggles without labor exploitation? The Spatial Discourse of Commoning

How do we build the commons? How do we create the basis for commoning practices in architecture and design? How do displacement, migration, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-3

22  Pelin Tan

contested spaces affect the notion of the commons? According to Massimo De Angelis, “Commons are a means of establishing a new political discourse that builds on and helps to articulate the many existing, often minor, struggles, and recognizes their power to overcome capitalist society.” He defines three notions to explain the commons—not merely in terms of the resources that we share— but as a way of commoning, that is, a social process of “being common”: First, all commons involve some sort of common pool of resources, understood as non-commodified means of fulfilling peoples [sic] needs. Second, the commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities—this of course is a very problematic term and topic, but nonetheless we have to think about it. Communities are sets of commoners who share these resources and who define for themselves the rules according to which they are accessed and used. Communities, however, do not necessarily have to be bound to a locality, they could also operate through translocal spaces. They also need not be understood as “homogeneous” in their cultural and material features. In addition to these two elements—the pool of resources and the set of communities—the third and most important element in terms of conceptualizing the commons is the verb “to common”—the social process that creates and reproduces the commons.1 Thus, commoning is how resources are pooled and made available to individuals who build or rediscover a sense of community. Spaces where commoning practices are developed in relation to design and architecture are often related to physical spaces in the realm of social design. The ultimate role of spatial design is that the physical structure or form at any scale should serve the practice of commons. However, commoning practices require a social assembly process, including common decision-making and non-capitalist accumulation; thus, developing a consistent design program is challenging. The dilemma in design and architecture is rooted in the question of whether an existing act, such as squatting in an abandoned building, is also a practice of architecture or design. For some architects and designers, even a self-organized refugee camp that has undergone several “intifadas” can be a commoning space that can inform us about design and architecture. The Palestine-based collective Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR) uses the term al masha (communal land) instead of commons: Masha is shared land, which was recognized through practice in the Islamic world. .  .  . Masha could only exist if people decided to cultivate the land together. The moment they stop cultivating it, they lose its possession. It is possession through common use.2 DAAR uses al masha as a practice of commoning as direct participation and common taking care of life.

The Scale of Commons  23

In my experience, practices and discourses on commons vary according to scale and territorial specificity. Space-based solidarity practice is one part of practicing the commons; others span from the urban to the rural at different scales. Here the question of scale is not only a physical element of design and architecture but also reflects how it is politically conceived. Stavros Stavrides echoes this argument, as does DAAR, in defining how essential common space and its structure are. For Stavrides, “common space shapes commoning practices as well as the subjects of commoning.”3 Common space is relational and relative. I propose, first, that the relationality and relativity of a common space play a role in the politically conceived scales of how we practice and negotiate with commoning. Second, commoning practices require creating criticality models connected to new forms of communality through places, infrastructures, and buildings. In addition, commoning practices implement “collective” effort (collective action) and forms of cohabitation and, on the other side, shared precariousness. According to J.K. Gibson-Graham, The “collective” in this context does not suggest the massing together of like subjects, nor should the term “action” imply an efficacy that originates in intentional beings or that is distinct from thought. We are trying for a broad and distributed notion of collective action, to recognize and keep open possibilities of connection and development.4 TABLE 1.1 Diverse Economies Diagram Adapted from J.K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist

Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)

TRANSACTIONS MARKET

LABOR WAGE

ENTERPRISE CAPITALIST

ALTERNATIVE MARKET

ALTERNATIVE PAID

ALTERNATIVE CAPITALIST

Sale of public goods Ethical “fair-trade” markets Local trading systems Alternative currencies Underground market Co-op exchange Barter Informal market

Self-employed Cooperative Indentured Reciprocal labor In-kind Work for welfare

State enterprise Green capitalist Socially responsible firm Nonprofit

NONMARKET

UNPAID

NONCAPITALIST

Household flows Gift giving Indigenous exchange State allocations State appropriations Gleaning Hunting, fishing, gathering Theft, poaching

Housework Family care Neighborhood work Volunteer Self-provisioning labor Slave labor

Communal Independent Feudal Slave

24  Pelin Tan

Collective action requires the ethics of a community economy. Gibson and Graham by mapping diverse labor, care, and precarious relations try to find alternative micro community structures inside the capitalist dominant system. Those local or micro community structures may foster collective actions and the collective economy. With a diverse economic map Gibson-Graham presents a kind of non-capitalistic economies and work relations, which cannot be placed under the static capitalist order. They are trying to map alternative economies into community economies which form collective action and its ethics. Gibson-Graham suggests moving slowly from community economies to autonomous structures and then from autonomous structures to collective action. For example, self-organization is not a simple hierarchy based on certain labor activities and their division but a work/labor structure that allows a shift of the tasks of the activists and refugees together. It is more an act of ethics of locality that meets the needs suggested by our everyday knowledge and the experience of safeguarding our livelihoods in both urban and rural spaces. The relational network established as a result is more of an instant community that chooses to think and discuss together rather than a normative structure. How can self-organized, self-regulating networks and collective structures such as the urban Occupy movements inspire economic models, primarily where the generation and redistribution of wealth are concerned? Moreover, how can the urban spaces in which these networks and structures emerge, under exceptional conditions, serve as “common knowledge” based on the practice of “commoning”? Central to the meaning of “commons” in this context is not what we own, share, or produce in terms of property but the social relations most closely connected to everyday life. The food activist Raj Patel has looked at the role that food has played in social movements—for example, the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program for school children, the People’s Grocery in Oakland, or the international peasants’ movement Via Campesina—helping to create different forms of solidarity. According to Patel’s definition, “Commons is about how we manage resources together.”5 However, his argument is not only about managing and sustaining the cultivation and sharing of food but also about how food-related movements should act in solidarity with other movements. Thus, the concept of “commons,” as understood here, holds a sensitive position within any given community or public, especially in contested territories or cities subject to the threat of the neoliberal destruction of the built environment. Negotiation and the resolution of conflicting values are critical to such commoning practices. As Stavrides argues, more than the act or fact of sharing, it is the existence of common grounds for negotiation that is the most important. Scales of Commons

Conceptualizing commons concerning the public does not focus so much on similarities or commonalities but on exploring the very differences between people on a purposefully instituted common ground, thus establishing grounds

The Scale of Commons  25

for negotiation rather than affirming that which is shared. The public alone, in affirming that of which is shared, might not suffice in negotiating differences. One mode is the spatial scale from a temporary camp to a tent or a one-street neighborhood or a building like City Plaza in Athens brings out the discussion about how the spatial scale affects the network of communities either in the move or temporary dwellings. Both concerns are connecting networks of other spatialities that build up collectivities. A common garden, a building, a camp, and a tent present various scales of gathering and creation of laboring and

FIGURE 1.1 

City Plaza Hotel, Athens, Greece, Photo Pelin Tan

26  Pelin Tan

uncommon knowledge. Any proximity of a physical scale to its social-political extension brings the sustainability of the scale of commoning. One example of commoning practices, through community gardens in urban areas, producing healthy food infrastructures but also triggering the creation of the modalities of solidarities among precarious urban communities is İzmir (Turkey) Kemeraltı Komşu Bostanlar (Kemeraltı Neighborhood Orchards) initiated by a collective neighborhood-cultivation practice and seed-bank in the very center of poor urban areas where it has been based for years. Kemeraltı and Basmane district in the city of İzmir is on the shore of the Aegean Sea, where many migrants and refugees are trying to cross the sea to Europe. Both districts, former Ottoman communities’ historical areas, are inhabited by daily workers, refugees from Africa and the Middle East, students, artists, and others that are mainly economically unable to survive sustainably and are mostly invisible in the urban space. The aim of such ecological practice, which mainly developed during the times of the Covid-19 pandemic, is to create a care infrastructure that brings together many precarious people in a shared space and exchanges labor. The initiative created not only relational spaces in the neighborhoods in the threshold scales but also a means of solidarity for daily survival in the urban spaces where resilience becomes vital. What I mean by threshold scale is a physical scale where the practice of survival, negotiation, care, and struggle is happening. According to spatial scale which is not only a physical measurement but also socio-political, scale represents the means of minorities, non-human cycles, and the process of spatial environment. For instance, a scale of a corridor built with waste material by the Ezidi Refugee Women is not about creating a path of movement though the tent settlement but a socio-spatial connection with kinship of the community that connects the related tents and creates semi-­public spaces of intimacy of the women community. The thresholds scale appears through survival, negotiation, struggle, and relationality of temporariness that also conveys further spatial scales, self-organized built environment, and network of commons. An open library of knowledge of plants, cultivation, and seeds is the basics that bring the possibilities of practice and knowledge into urban space. Threshold, that is, an in-between and structure of conveying relational spaces that I  describe, in many scenarios such as spaces that convert its function, or an incomplete entity, or an infrastructure which appears as an outcome of an ephemeral spatiality. Scale, either socio-politically embedded or a physical built environment, represents a parameter of defining the border of possibilities and resilience. A threshold scale could be a neighborhood, an occupied building, an orchard, a refugee camp, or a tent. Refugee and migrant camps are key spaces where trans-local commoning practices are the basics of everyday life from the bottom up. Camps are known spaces of production for many actors and agencies in several locations such

The Scale of Commons  27

as Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and other territories. Camps were established in 2013 in Turkey as an outcome of the flow of the Syrian civil war. Ezidis, Syrian Arabs (Muslim and Christian), the Syrian Dom community, and many other ethnic communities migrated from Syria and Northern Iraq to the towns in the borderlands of Turkey. We have witnessed many formations and their processes, and we pedagogically engaged in mapping the practice of commoning and care infrastructures. Highly secured tent and container camps first started being built in Turkey by the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD)— a Turkish state administrative body operating with the United Nations (U.N.) ­support—in 2013 to house refugees from the Syrian civil war. At the same time, many self-organized or NGO-organized camps began appearing, such as occupying bus terminal buildings or vacant spaces between towns or urban neighborhoods. In both types, refugees have reorganized and adapted these spatial environments according to their everyday needs and backgrounds. Among my questions in the pedagogical space were: What trans-local commoning practices could exist between urbanized camps such as Dheisheh or Al-Fawar in Palestine and those recently established in Turkey? How can we redefine and experience the infrastructure of thresholds, commoning practices, and methods of experimental heritage that emerge within them? Moreover, how might architectural and design pedagogies provide a commons base for such understanding of relational scales? Different geographical conditions, sociopolitical forces, and uncommon histories make cumulative interpretation and analysis difficult. However, this uncommon knowledge is one form of how methodologies can be expanded, and concepts redefined. The anachronistic forms of refugee camps lead us towards a new understanding of dwelling, which is not grounded in practices of “empathy” but instead of knitting the commons. I ran various design studios in Palestinian camps in the West Bank, such as Dheisheh Camp and Al-Fawar camp, as well as in Turkey near our town Mardin where we live. In the case of the cities of Mardin and Diyarbakır and their region, many Ezidis established temporary hubs of camps and dwellings. Between 2013 and 2018 I ran a postgraduate design studio at the Architecture Faculty, Artuklu University, Mardin, in which we documented and archived processes of selforganization and design in various camps, such as Calais, on the English Channel in France, to Al-Fawar and Pikpa in Lesvos, a Greek island 4km from the Turkish coast, and Midyat in Mardin, just 25km from the Syrian border in southwest Turkey. We have focused on questions around autonomous, interdependent infrastructures and commoning practices from an architectural perspective, which has led us to look at the camps’ tangible and intangible heritage. In 2015, we conducted a workshop in Dheisheh Refugee Camp on the idea of “autonomous infrastructure” with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. Instead of basic forms of infrastructure like water or electricity, we focused primarily on solidarity, which we found to be closely linked to those more basic, material

28  Pelin Tan

FIGURE 1.2 Dheisheh

Camp, Tent Gathering with Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR), 2015, Photo Pelin Tan

forms. One master’s student, urbanist Yildiz Tahtacı, drew a parallel between the Women’s Center and Square in Al-Fawar Refugee Camp and the women’s laundry center in Benusen, a neighborhood in Diyarbakir populated by Kurds who were forced to migrate from their villages in the 1990s and due to state-led urban development, might be forced to move again. Tahtacı’s thesis was that despite their geopolitical difference, a comparison between structures of the commons could be made between recent Greek and Turkish camps and more urbanized and established ones in Palestine and Jordan. Like eviction and exile in Al-Fawar and Benusen, women from shared backgrounds created threshold spaces where commons are practiced. Spaces in-between and built through collective needs that lead to expand the commoning everyday practices are thresholds where daily survival, resistance, negotiation between subjects and spaces are existing. Similarly, the kitchens, bathrooms, and shared vegetable gardens where we witnessed families organizing and designing during our two-year survey of Çınar camp in Diyarbakir had a parallel in Al-Fawar’s rooftop gardens. Thresholds function as a space of passage, a bridge that creates potentialities. Localities are reproduced within threshold spaces such as refugee camps, detention centers, or safe passages, and commons are practiced through diverse social solidarities and imaginations in situations of supposedly temporary precariousness.

The Scale of Commons  29

FIGURE 1.3 

Çınar Camp in Diyarbakir, Photo Pelin Tan

According to Silvia Federici, commoning practices require community-based relations with the principles of cooperation and responsibility to one another. Examples like Pikpa camp in Lesvos—which serves more of a space for safe passage rather than one of confinement—or City Plaza Hotel in Athens—an occupied space where refugee families and Greek activists together act as one— are thresholds evolving within co-existing communities. However, in many refugee camps, ethnic identity and religion often act as the basis for community networks and formative relations. While this can result in social structures that leave certain inhabitants vulnerable, design can ameliorate or even subvert such conditions. Ezidi women in the Çınar camp, for instance, are prohibited by their husbands from sitting in front of their tents. As a response, they have built semipublic extensions to their tents from found materials like wood, blankets, and humanitarian-grade plastic sheeting. While indifferent and at times conflicting, each of these cases demonstrates Federici’s claim that commoning practices not only can overcome vulnerability and precariousness but also highlight the role of women in their becoming. The scale of commons here is a unit as much as a collective. The effects of war and the active renegotiation of borders demand a transformation in the way infrastructure is approached and worked with, not just as

30  Pelin Tan

the functional and scalar threshold of architecture but also as mechanisms that form part of that. Within such a framework, I see conflict and possibility in connecting “infrastructure” with commoning practices. Towards these ends, design and architectural pedagogy can be used as a tool to understand infrastructure as empirical facts of how heterogeneous forms of the commons are rooted in daily life. The camp, for example, is a vulnerable space. It is constituted by its thresholds and the exchanges across it. It is a space of small economic initiatives and heterogenous commoning practices that subvert established heritage, urban, neighborhood, and citizenship concepts. It is thus something that should be not only physically protected but also institutionally valued. The documentation and archiving of temporary heritage, which a modernist approach to preservation might not recognize, is therefore essential. The Çınar camp was decommissioned, and all its inhabitants were transferred to Midyat, an official AFAD, state-run camp, in December 2016. The material we collected during our two-year survey is the only lasting documentation of the heterogenous commons that took place there. Producing a collective body of knowledge about refugee camps and the representation of their commoning practices is a vital part of its heritage so that it may be shared and passed onto future generations. In addition, dwelling and sheltering represent alternatives to camp’s structure that are often placed outside the city and urban borders. Most of the self-organized initiatives and camps are making an effort to engage in various forms in the cities, as in the City Plaza hotel, where the camp exists in a neighborhood at the heart of the city, not only outside in the far field as a detention camp. Threshold Infrastructure as Solidarity

In conclusion, architectural and spatial pedagogies closely connect with ­bottom-up commoning practices. Space scales influence commoning practices and trans-local knowledge during and in emergency situations, conflict urbanism, or non-state conditions. The threshold infrastructure refers to spatial infrastructures in a camp or urban space in extreme topographies and geographies. It also refers to intangible solidarity exchanges. Solidarity of labor exchange, ­inter-dependency, and autonomous dwelling structures supported by socially engaged art and architectural practices bring forward the question of sustainability with the ethics of commons. The concept of ethics of locality often studied by Gibson-Graham6 is a vital norm in creating and setting commoning practices among space and communities. In such cases, urban gardening, neighborhood schools, cultivation practices, and reactivating common places are the spaces of threshold infrastructures that sustain the social relation and care of precarious

The Scale of Commons  31

communities either on the move or in temporary conditions. These threshold infrastructures are entangled through ethics of localities that are conveyed through support and exchange economies based on solidarity practices. Notes 1 Massimo De Angelis, “On the Commons: A  Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides,” interview with in An Architektur, e-flux, no. 17 (June  2010), www.e-flux.com/journal/17/67351/on-the-commons-a-public-interviewwith-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/. 2 Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, “Beyond the Public: A Common Space in Fawwar Refugee Camp,” Theatrum Mundi, April  3, 2013, https://theatrum-mundi.org/wp-­ content/uploads/2018/04/Beyond-Public-a-common-space-in-Fawaar-refugee-camp. pdf. See also Alessandro Petti, “Architecture as Exile,” in Adhocracy Athens: From Making Things to Making the Commons, eds. Ethel Baraona Pohl, Pelin Tan, and César Reyes Nájera (Barcelona: dpr-barcelona; Athens: Onassis Cultural Center, 2015), 103–4. 3 Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Common (London: Zed Books, 2016), 283. 4 J. K. Gibson-Graham, “An Ethics of the Local,” Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 1 (2003): 9–10. 5 Raj Patel, “The Hungry of the Earth,” Radical Philosophy, no. 151 (September/­ October 2008), www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/the-hungry-of-the-earth. 6 Gibson-Graham, “An Ethics of the Local,” Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 1 (2003): 49–74.

Bibliography Baldauf, Anette, Stefan Gruber, Moira Hille, Annette Krauss, Vladimir Miller, Mara Verlič, Hong-Kai Wang, and Julia Wieger, eds. Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday. London: Sternberg Press, 2016. De Angelis, Massimo. “On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides.” Interview with in An Architektur. e-flux, no. 17 (June 2010). www.e-flux.com/journal/17/67351/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-withmassimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/. Gibson-Graham, J. K. “An Ethics of the Local.” Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 1 (2003). Kotronaki, Loukia, Olga Lafazani, and Giorgos Maniatis. “Living Resistance: Experiences from Refugee Housing Squats in Athens.” South Atlantic Quarterly, no. 117 (2018): 892. Patel, Raj. “The Hungry of the Earth.” Radical Philosophy, no. 151 (September/October 2008). www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/the-hungry-of-the-earth. Petti, Alessandro, and Sandi Hilal. “Beyond the Public: A Common Space in Fawwar Refugee Camp.” Theatrum Mundi, April 3, 2013. https://theatrum-mundi.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/04/Beyond-Public-a-common-space-in-Fawaar-refugee-camp.pdf. See also Alessandro Petti. “Architecture as Exile.” In Adhocracy Athens: From Making Things to Making the Commons, edited by Ethel Baraona Pohl, Pelin Tan, and César Reyes Nájera. Barcelona: dpr-barcelona; Athens: Onassis Cultural Center, 2015.

32  Pelin Tan

Pietromarchi, Bartolomeo. The [Un]common place: Art, Public Space and Urban Aesthetics in Europe. Barcelona: Actar, 2005. Stavrides, Stavros. Common Space: The City as Common. London: Zed Books, 2016. Tan, Pelin. “Decolonizing Architectural Education: Towards an Affective Pedagogy.” In The Social (Re)Production of Architecture: Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice, edited by Doina Petrescu, Kim Trogal. London: Routledge, 2017. Tan, Pelin. “Architecture in Crisis Exception as a Form of Decay” [“Arquitectura en crisis La excepción como una forma de decadencia”]. ARQ (Santiago), no. 92 (2016).

2 A LANGUAGE ACT Making Language with and for Fluid Identities Amira Hanafi

Introduction

The United States of America, a nation founded through immigrant settlers, does not have an official language. Although the founders imagined a state of monolingualism and materialized it by erasing, obstructing, and concealing other languages, their invention was never codified in US federal law. The H.R. 997 bill—also known as the English Language Unity Act of 2019—is a piece of proposed legislation that, if passed, would establish an official language for the United States (Figure 2.1). In the summer of 2020, I posted the text of H.R. 997 to a Google document and opened it to the public for edits.1 I invited people who “know more than one language” to contribute a translation of any part into another language (Figure 2.2). A language act is a performative, material refusal of the proposed uniformity of official English—of the smoothness of an imagined monolingualism. Participants alter the text using different alphabets and vocabularies. The text is thus made and remade, disfigured and reconfigured. The document remains open for edits—subject to change—in a perpetually open collaborative space. The language that emerges is fluid, polyvocal, and translingual. The Materiality of Language

In his notes towards a theory of dialogism, Mikhail Bakhtin characterizes language as an embodied practice that manifests in the physical world. For Bakhtin, language is material. It is composed of dynamic objects that are exchanged between interlocutors. These utterances are subject to constant change as DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-4

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FIGURE 2.1 Screenshot

H.R. 997

of the Google Document Containing the Original Text of

different speakers articulate them, as different listeners receive them, and as they accumulate meaning over time. Seen through the lens of Bakhtinian dialogism, acts of speaking and writing are material practices: The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it to have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one). The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio). It is performed outside the author, and it cannot be introjected into the author.2 Projected outside the speaker’s body, language is material that belongs to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. It passes between bodies. Every speaker makes their own meaning, but everything spoken also has a listener who makes meaning from what they hear. The material of language is woven between users. It bends, thickens, and changes through a collective. The Bakhtinian drama of language lies at the intersections of social forces, between different characters, voices, and perspectives. In his book on the

A Language Act  35

FIGURE 2.2 Screenshot

of the Google Document Containing the Text of H.R. 997 and suggested Alterations

materiality of language, literary theorist David Bleich draws limits around Bakhtin’s “inalienable right to the word.” Bleich uses the concept of ‘access to language’ to frame relations of power inherent in every language act: “We reach others when what we say matters to them. As we reach more people and more people reach us, we have more access to language.”3 For Bakhtin, speakers and listeners change the meanings of language objects. For Bleich, the sphere of influence of an utterance is limited by socially and culturally constructed conventions of discourse and style. Not everyone has equal access to language, he argues; not every language act is projected from an equal plane. The “master” meaning or person is created by those with custody of the language, whereas those who are not masters can also make words mean whatever they choose them to mean (that is, what co-speakers will go along with) but because they are not masters, their meanings and usages will not have enough value to become authoritative.4

36  Amira Hanafi

Decolonial thinkers Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook take a nonmaterialist view of language when they write that languages “do not exist as real entities in the world and neither do they emerge from or represent real environments; they are, by contrast, the inventions of social, cultural and political movements.”5 Still, they insist that linguistic inventions have “very real material effects” in the world, which are concretized in law and policy, through forms, applications, and examinations, at school, and in other parts of society. Thus, there are strong arguments for mother tongue education, for an understanding of multilingualism as the global norm, for understanding the prevalence of code-switching in bilingual and multilingual communities, and for the importance of language rights to provide a moral and legal framework for language policies. Our position, however, is that although such arguments may be preferable to blinkered views that posit a bizarre and rare state of monolingualism as the norm, they nevertheless remain caught within the same paradigm. They operate with a strategy of pluralization rather than questioning those inventions at the core of the discussion.6 Makoni and Pennycook see distinct, named languages as colonial inventions that need to be ‘disinvented.’ Languages are not composed of discrete sets of objects. They cannot be separated because language is a social practice. Conceiving of language as relational erodes the hierarchy of languages by making it impossible to count speakers. People are articulated as individuals who fluently draw from variable, fluid, and shared resources—a linguistic commons—in order to express ourselves. Rather than label people as bilingual, multilingual, or polylingual, Makoni and Pennycook conceive of each individual as possessing a unique language repertoire. “The problem with the term ‘diversity’ is that it enumerates; fluidity is uncountable,” they write.7 Scholar and educator Ofelia García practices a pedagogical approach called translanguaging that challenges the boundaries drawn by monolingualism. Translanguaging is “[a] way of teaching. A pedagogy that builds on those fluid language practices that bilinguals have.”8 It is “the use of the full language repertoire to make meaning, without thinking of the fact that one language is different from the other.” Translanguaging is an explicitly political project. It can be read as a project of linguistic disinvention in its intent to “disrupt the hierarchies of named languages that were installed by colonial expansion and nation-building . . . to liberate sign systems that have been constrained by socio-political domination, attempting to give voice to all and redress power differentials among speakers.”9 García further articulates the liberatory aims of the project: In most bilingual situations, one language group is more powerful than the other. Keeping the two languages separate at all times creates a linguistic

A Language Act  37

hierarchy with one language considered the powerful majority language, and the other minoritized. But by making use of flexible language practices, translanguaging releases ways of speaking that are often very much controlled and silenced. When new voices are released, histories of subjugation are brought forth, building a future of equity and social justice.10 The project detailed in this chapter—simply titled A language act—conceives of language as a social practice, a weaving between bodies. I understand language as a site where displays of power are continuously produced and contested. I employ translanguaging as a creative tool for liberating communication from colonial thought, taking inspiration from García’s activism in the classroom. I use digital space, the space of the page, and an emancipated orthography as tools to upset the boundaries between languages and to render a jagged linguistic landscape. Establishing a State of Monolingualism European colonizers invented themselves and others in a reciprocal process. —Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages

As it involves shaping geographical spaces, nation-building can be understood as a spatial practice. In the case of the United States of America, a nation founded through the practice of settler colonialism, strategies of displacement are essential to the nation-building project, including the forced removal of Indigenous people from the land on which they live and their replacement by invasive settlers who aim to occupy the land in perpetuity, as well as the violent relocation of large numbers of people from the African continent. Other spatial strategies that are core to the nation-building project try to make Black and Indigenous people and their cultural practices invisible. The ideology that underpins these spatial practices of displacement and concealment also finds manifestation in the development of cultural artifacts in the young nation, including language. Values of uniformity and homogeneity were central to the construction of a national identity and to the establishment of a system of government, as well as to the planning of cities and buildings that would exemplify an imagined national character. The nation’s founders—some of whom were also architects—enacted a desire for an ideal of ‘unity’ that is ultimately dependent on the aggressive erasure of elements perceived to threaten the establishment of a strong and stable state. The founders advanced an ideal of monolingualism that became enshrined in policy and law.

38  Amira Hanafi

To establish a state of monolingualism, the architects of the new nation materialized an ideal of uniformity. All of the so-called founders of the United States of America were of British descent. They spoke English. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that established this country were drafted and ratified in English. By composing the nation’s founding documents in the English language, the founders imagined a population of citizens who shared English as a common language. In 1788, John Jay articulated this imaginary in the Federalist Papers: providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.11 The homogeneous people that Jay describes did not exist on this continent; it was by delineating them, and by marginalizing others, that this population could be brought into being. The men of European descent who worked together to establish a nation-state on Turtle Island never declared an official language for their invention. Although it is impossible to arrive at a countable number, scholars estimate that there were several hundred, often widely divergent indigenous languages spoken on this land before Columbian contact.12 As Africans were forcibly displaced to the continent, Arabic and other African languages were also spoken here. Initially, the nation’s founders relied on the exclusion of speakers of those languages from access to citizenship or to legal personhood to conceal existing languages and begin to fashion a state of monolingualism. The omnipresence of their languages was manifestly ignored. Later, the state’s tactics would turn to displacement and erasure. Another example of the covert establishment of monolingualism in the United States materializes in the work of William Thornton. In his essay on the British-American designer’s 1792 plan for the US Capitol building, Peter Minosh situates Thornton’s architectural plan within the context of the “larger philosophical system” laid out in his 1793 work, Cadmus, or, A Treatise on the Elements of Written Language. Thornton proposes a universal orthography—a common system of writing and spelling to represent the sounds of language in a consistent and standardized way. Remarkably, Thornton hopes for his alphabet to be used to represent all of the world’s languages. “We must first fix all the sounds,” he declares.13 Then: Foreigners would, with the assistance of books alone, be able to learn the language in their closets, when they could not have the benefit of masters; and would be able to converse through the medium of books, which at present are of no service whatever, in learning to speak a language; and if this were to be

A Language Act  39

adopted by the Americans, and not by the English, the best English authors would be reprinted in America, and every stranger to the language even in Europe, who thinks it of more consequence to speak the English correctly, than to write it with present errors, would purchase American editions, and would be ashamed to spell incorrectly, when he could acquire the mode of spelling well. . . . Dialects would be utterly destroyed, both among foreigners and peasants.14 Minosh points out that, despite Thornton’s “claims upon the universal,” his proposed system “actually normalize[s] English as the universal standard of all human speech.”15 The majority of characters in his orthography already exist in the English alphabet; moreover, in order to achieve uniformity, the orthography imposes English sounds and spellings onto other languages. His system promotes not only a linguistic hegemony for English, but a cultural hegemony for US Americans as the superior authors of its conventions. Besides Black and Indigenous people, there were white settlers speaking languages other than English on Turtle Island16 at the time of the nation’s founding. The founders were especially anxious about large populations of German settlers in Pennsylvania, whom they interpreted as a threat to English. In 1750, Benjamin Franklin expressed his fears around German speakers: “This will in a few years become a German colony; instead of their Learning our Language we must learn theirs, or live as if in a foreign country.”17 In 1795, Congress rejected a request from a group of Germans in Virginia: “that a certain proportion of the laws of the United States may be printed in the German language.”18 This refusal to grant access to translation forced German speakers to learn English if they were to participate in the political life of the country. It also coincided with the passing of the Naturalization Act of 1795, which more than doubled the period of required residence in the United States before a “free White person” could achieve citizenship. In her Notes on Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Capitol, Mabel O. Wilson discusses how a set of emerging values at the intersection of developing discourses on architecture, race, and nationalism were embodied in the materials and designs that Jefferson planned for the Virginia state capitol, which would become a model for other capitol buildings in the US. Using brick and stone, Jefferson wanted the building to “project the longevity and stability of the state,” to “represent the virtues of durability, utility, and beauty,” to “win the admiration of Europeans,” and to “become a model of architecture worth emulating.”19 His design created underground and concealed spaces where enslaved labor could be carried out hidden from view, where it might not blemish the ideals of democratic virtue and sublimity that he wanted the building to project. In his writing around the time he was designing the capitol building, Jefferson proposed a parallel strategy of displacement to confront the problem of emancipation of

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enslaved African people (as he conceived it). Jefferson believed that, should Black people be freed from slavery, they could not peacefully coexist with white people within the boundaries of the young nation. He thought that Black people should be “removed beyond the reach of mixture,” resettled, and replaced with “an equal number of white inhabitants.”20 As the nation-building project expanded, language remained intimately entangled with efforts to refine its citizenry. Although English was never declared as an official language for the United States, various English-only laws were put into place in education, voting, and the judicial system. A number of Southern states passed anti-literacy laws following the 1739 Stono Rebellion, an uprising of enslaved people in South Carolina. From 1740 to 1834, these laws prohibited anyone from teaching enslaved or free Black people to read or write. After the 13th Amendment was passed, some states built on the foundation paved by antiliteracy laws and used literacy tests to obstruct Black people from exercising their right to vote.21 In their study of the rhetorical style of the oral and written examinations that were used to disenfranchise Black voters from the 1890s to 1965, Natasha N. Jones and Miriam F. Williams conclude that: forms and applications used in the very process of oppression and discrimination will not seem out of the ordinary. The style of writing will not read as aggressive or disrespectful, the document design will not appear unprofessional or unfamiliar, and the delivery will be incorporated into a process supported by enforceable and legitimate laws. . . . History shows us that laws, regulations, and technical and legal documents do support and enforce civil rights infringements and human rights atrocities.22 As early as 1819, the US government funded religious groups and other individuals to live among Indigenous people, to teach them the English language and to suppress their cultural practices. Later in the century, the Bureau of Indian Affairs matured the state’s genocidal reprogramming policies with the opening of Indian boarding schools. In its first two decades, the boarding school system removed at least 20,000 children from tribes all over Turtle Island and placed them in schools far from their homes.23 There, they were forbidden to speak their languages or practice other elements of their cultures; they were subjected to abundant emotional, psychological, and physical abuses. In 1881, Nellie Robertson, a student in an Indian boarding school, wrote an apologetic letter to her superintendent, a state agent who was responsible for the erasure of her language: Dear Sir Capt. Pratt: I write this letter with much sorrow to tell you that I have spoken one Indian word. I will tell you how it happened: yesterday evening in the dining-hall Alice

A Language Act  41

Wynn talked to me in Sioux, and before I knew what I was saying I found that I had spoken one word, and I felt so sorry that I could not eat my supper, and I could not forget that Indian word, and while I was sitting at the table the tears rolled down my cheeks. I tried very hard to speak only English. Nellie Robertson24 Erasing the Languages of Immigrants

My family history is, like most US settlers, an entangled migrant one. My ancestors moved to Turtle Island when space was created for them through US government legislation. My mother’s family left Germany in the early nineteenth century and became settlers in territories off the north coast of the Black Sea. They remained there for about a hundred years, until they resettled across the Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century, where they participated in the occupation of Indigenous territory via the US Homestead Act. My father’s migration also responded to US legislation; he left Egypt and came to settle in the US under the rubric of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. He worked in the burgeoning computer industry and studied at the University of Minnesota. My parents met and married in Minneapolis in 1971. On both sides of my family, language shifted dramatically after migration. My mother’s grandparents preserved a way of speaking that was specific to the Black Sea Germans, which they passed on to their children, but my mother never became a fluent speaker of that language. After she moved away from her family and married my father, she lost the vocabulary she’d learned as a child. As I was growing up, we spoke English in our family home. German was conspicuously absent, but Arabic had a consistent presence. It was my father’s first language, the language in which he regularly cursed me out, and the language of our religious practice. But I did not speak Arabic. As I grew older, I felt an increasing amount of guilt and shame for not being a fluent Arabic speaker. I tried to repair this by studying formal Arabic in college, both in New Jersey and in Cairo. Still, I felt that I was an outsider to my ancestral tongue. It was not until I moved to Cairo in 2010 that I learned to speak Egyptian colloquial language. My immersion healed feelings of guilt and shame. It also transformed my conceptual relationship to language. I met people whose languages stretched across a brilliant spectrum of vocabularies, accents, vernaculars, and creoles. I met Egyptian people living in Egypt who did not read or write in Arabic. I carried out a years-long project to document language change in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, via the spoken language of hundreds of people who had participated. All of this experience added up to give me permission to inhabit my “full language repertoire”—to use the words of teacher and scholar Ofelia García—using it as a tool for my self-actualization.25

42  Amira Hanafi

In the summer of 2020, Ghenwa Hayek, who was serving as Interim Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, invited me to stage an intervention as part of the FarBar series, a digital re-interpretation of one of the Center’s pre-pandemic live programs. I had just left my home of ten years in downtown Cairo and returned to live in the United States. I was staying in the abundantly multilingual city of Hamtramck, Michigan, and working with Laura Kraftowitz and Edward Salem to help start up the Detroit chapter of City of Asylum, a nonprofit that provides free homes to artists who are threatened in their countries of origin. The organization assists artists in navigating governmental immigration services in order to secure visas, travel to the US, and, in some cases, to remain in the country long term. My personal circumstances at the moment of the Gray Center’s invitation, in combination with the research I was doing on behalf of the emerging chapter of City of Asylum, provided the immediate framework for the project. Newly re-arrived in the US from Egypt, where I had begun the challenging work of untethering the tight bind between language and the nation-state, A language act became a site for my reflection on the language practices of migrants, exiles, and other border-crossers. For people seeking citizenship in the US, English-language testing has been part of the naturalization process since the Immigration Act of 1917. The Act instituted an English literacy test that created new limits on who could achieve US citizenship. In 1919, President Theodore Roosevelt clarified the government’s stance on immigration by claiming that all immigrants could find equality in this country, provided that they assimilated “in every facet” to an imagined US American ideal, including language: We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polygot boarding house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.26 In 1982, the late Senator S.I. Hayakawa of California introduced a constitutional amendment into Congress to make English the official language of the United States, stating that, “Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.”27 Hayakawa also founded the lobbying organization U.S. English, whose sole purpose was to make English the official language of the US. Hayakawa’s proposed amendment was never reported out of committee, but there are now thirty-six states that have declared English as an official language (seven of which have additional official languages). In 1994, former board members of U.S. English founded another lobbying organization and introduced at least five bills into Congress proposing to designate English as the official language of the United States. ProEnglish is the

A Language Act  43

lobbying organization behind the English Language Unity Act of 2019 that is the focus of my intervention. Its umbrella organization, US Incorporated, also seeks the repeal of birthright citizenship and the banning of sanctuary cities. The network was founded by John Tanton (whom Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement”) and houses a dozen other anti-immigrant organizations, including the influential Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).28 The English-only movement relies heavily on an us/them binary, positioning ‘us’ in a disciplinary role and creating punitive barriers for non-speakers of English. Among its stated purposes for pursuing official English, ProEnglish states that it would like to “reinforce America’s historic message to new immigrants—that we expect them to learn English as the first step in their assimilation.”29 In another bullet point on their website, the ProEnglish lobby claims a benefit of official English: “Official English gives no person the right to demand government services in a language other than English.”30 In other words, official English strips people of their ability to access translation. Language justice activists frame translation as a human right: At its core, translation is about access to information as a human right. Particularly given the strong xenophobic and nativist sentiments present in our current political moment, translation is a critical part of protecting individuals’ and communities’ basic civil and human rights.31 The current movement to declare English as the official language of the US repeatedly restages the founders’ acts of imagining a homogeneous, white, monolingual population for the United States. In 1993, John Tanton wrote: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”32 ProEnglish states as one of its guiding principles: “in a pluralistic nation such as ours, the function of government should be to foster and support the similarities that unite us, rather than institutionalize the differences that divide us.” Rendering a Jagged Linguistic Landscape

The series of projects of which A language act is a part takes Makoni and Pennycook’s prompt to reconstitute language: a process that may involve both becoming aware of the history of the construction of languages, and rethinking the ways we look at languages and their relation to identity and geographical location, so that we move beyond notions of linguistic territorialization in which language is linked to a geographical space.33

44  Amira Hanafi

To do so, I  facilitate acts of languaging. I  invite collaborators to engage in meaning-making processes (instead of producing fixed meanings). I try to fabricate space for polyvocal states of being (rather than fashion polyvocal texts). I approach language as a site where displays of power are continuously produced and contested, or, appealing to the title of this volume, to a practice of commoning. I staged the crowd translation of the English Language Unity Act of 2019 as a counterposition to the unified smoothness of official English. A language act imagines Turtle Island as a rough and jagged linguistic landscape—as a territory inhabited by plural, polyvocal, fluid populations (Figure 2.3). A key feature of the intervention is that it continues indefinitely. Versions of the text might be produced at intervals. These drafts can be printed and published, but the invitation to edit the document stays open and the project remains unfinished.34 In December 2020, I accepted all of the suggested translations in the Google document containing the text of H.R. 997, and printed copies of the reconfigured text. At first glance, this version of the document resembles the original bill. It uses the same typography and formatting. On closer look, disfigurations come into focus: replaced characters, re-interpreted vocabulary, peculiar translations, and choral repetitions. On the last day of the year, I mailed printed copies of the document to twenty-eight white men in Washington, DC—the Republican sponsors of the bill (Figure 2.4).35 I have not yet received any response. A language act requires the participation of many individuals, who must encounter one another.36 Layers of suggested and accepted translations might be translated again. This continuously unfolding series of confrontations and negotiations is made possible through the use of an online collaborative text editor, which allows people who participate to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously. The editor is a fluid space for constantly shifting and re-invented language, where users meet each other’s jagged edges in and out of time. In October 2020, I invited people who had contributed to the project to meet on Zoom. When participants responded to my invitation, I asked them to share the names of languages they know. During the workshop, we discussed the act of translation, collaboratively worked on the document, and read a version of it out loud, including awkward pauses, speculative pronunciations, and failure to

FIGURE 2.3 

Jagged Plurality | Smooth singularity, Diagram by Amira Hanafi

A Language Act  45

FIGURE 2.4 Preparing

the Document for Mailing to the U.S. Congressional Representatives in December 2020, Photo Amira Hanafi

FIGURE 2.5 

An Alphabetical List of Languages Reported

decipher some alphabetic characters. These figures present a few ways of looking at the language abilities present in the room. The first of these visualizations (Figure 2.5) presents “named languages” which are, in most cases, tied to the geographical territories of nation-states. The second visualization (Figure 2.6) is more concerned with enumeration of the speakers of languages. Enumeration produces a hierarchy in the group, with dominant languages taking precedence over those with fewer speakers. In the final visualization (Figure 2.7), we learn a story about each individual in the group and their unique language repertoire. Conclusion

For A language act, I called out to people who “know more than one language.”37 I called out to people who claim multiple and fluid identities, people who cross

46  Amira Hanafi

FIGURE 2.6 

Number of Mentions of Each Reported Language

FIGURE 2.7 Unique

Groups of Languages as Reported by Each Individual Member of the Group

A Language Act  47

borders. I asked them to work in the same space as others to bring new language into being. Language for those who dwell in an “entanglement of worlds” (Ofelia García). Language in which “opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics” (Édouard Glissant).38 Language whose fluidity is uncountable. I am thinking of language as a practice (languaging). We are a changing chorus, each with our own language repertoire. Between us, language emerges. It contains multitudes; it is polyvocal; it wakes up one morning preferring another angle on all that it knows. It is a grotesque body “in the act of becoming . .  . continually built, created, and build[ing] and creat[ing] another body” (Mikhail Bakhtin).39 Language that “gives back as much as it receives, in luminous mutuality” (Luce Irigaray).40 We are speaking, we are translating and interpreting, we are listening to each other in and out of time. Notes 1 Congress.gov, “H.R.997–116th Congress (2019–2020): English Language Unity Act of 2019,” Library of Congress, February  16, 2019, www.congress.gov/ bill/116th-congress/house-bill/997/text. 2 M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis” in Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 121–22. 3 David Bleich, The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 15. 4 Ibid., 22. 5 Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007), 2. 6 Ibid., 22. 7 Ibid. 8 Ofelia García, Translanguaging, Talk of Prof. Ph.D. Ofelia García on the subject “Translanguaging” during the Multilingualism  & Diversity Lectures 2017. www. youtube.com/watch?v=5l1CcrRrck0, accessed 2 October 2022. 9 Ofelia García, “Decolonizing foreign, second, heritage, and first languages: Implications for education,” in The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages, ed. Donaldo Macedo (New York: Routledge, 2019), 152–68. 10 Ofelia García, “Theorizing Translanguaging for Educators,” in Translanguaging: A CUNY-NYSIEB Guide for Educators, eds. Christina Celic and Kate Seltzer (New York: CUNY-NYSIEB, 2012), 1–6, https://www.cuny-nysieb.org/wp-content/ uploads/2016/04/Translanguaging-Guide-March-2013.pdf. 11 John Jay, “Federalist Papers No. 2: Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence,” Independent Journal (October  31, 1787), https://guides.loc.gov/ federalist-papers/text-1-10#s-lg-box-wrapper-25493265. 12 Marianne Mithun, The Languages of Native North America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 13 William Thornton, Cadmus; or, a Treatise on the Elements of Written Language (London: Printed by R. Aitken and Son for the Author, and Sold by C. Dilly, 1796), 266. 14 Ibid., 272–73. 15 Peter Minosh, “American Architecture in the Black Atlantic: William Thornton’s Design for the United States Capitol,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical

48  Amira Hanafi

History from the Enlightenment to the Present, eds. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 50. 16 I am using Turtle Island in the sense that Gary Snyder defines it in the introductory note to his poetry collection Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974). “The old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millenia [sic], and reapplied by some of them to ‘North America’ in recent years.” Snyder further explicates in his essay “The Place, the Region, the Commons” published in The Practice of the Wild: Essays (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2020): “Calling this place ‘America’ is to name it after a stranger.” 17 As quoted by Karl JR Arndt in “German as the Official Language of the United States of America?” Monatshefte 68, no. 2 (Summer 1976), 130; James Crawford, Language Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 18 Ibid, 140. 19 Mabel O. Wilson, “Notes on Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Capitol,” Architect Magazine, December 28, 2020, accessed February 11, 2023, www.architectmagazine.com/ design/notes-on-thomas-jeffersons-virginia-capitol_o. 20 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Boston: Lilly and Wait, 1832.) 21 Natasha N. Jones and Miriam F. Williams, “Technologies of Disenfranchisement: Literacy Tests and Black Voters in the US from 1890 to 1965,” Technical Communication 65, no. 4 (November 2018): 371–86. 22 Ibid., 384. 23 Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 13. 24 As cited in David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 141. 25 Ofelia García, “Translanguaging, Talk of Prof. Ph.D. Ofelia García on the Subject ‘Translanguaging’ During the Multilingualism & Diversity Lectures 2017,” accessed October 2, 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l1CcrRrck0. 26 Theodore Roosevelt, “January 3, 1919, letter to the President of the American Defense Society,” in Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters, vol. II, ed. Joseph Bucklin Bishop (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920). 27 S. I. Hayakawa, “Sen. Hayakawa’s Speech: U.S. English.” U.S. English, U.S. English, Inc., October 18, 2016, www.usenglish.org/legislation/hayakawa-speech/. 28 “John Tanton,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed January  23, 2023, www.­ splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/john-tanton. 29 “ProEnglish: The Nation’s Leading English Language Advocates,” accessed October 4, 2022, https://proenglish.org/what-is-official-english/ 30 “Myths about ProEnglish,” accessed October  4, 2022, https://proenglish.org/ myths-about-proenglish/ 31 CCHE Language Justice Toolkit, Communities Creating Healthy Environments, accessed April 25, 2023, www.thepraxisproject.org/resource/2012/languagejustice. 32 In a December  10, 1993, letter to the late Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecology professor, quoted in “Extremist Files: John Stanton,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed October 4, 2022, www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ individual/john-tanton 33 Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007), 3.

A Language Act  49

34 See Amira Hanafi, “٩٩٧ ‫( رح‬A Language Act),” Portable Gray 4, no. 2, University of Chicago Press (September 1, 2021): 405–10. 35 Rep. Allen, Rick W. [R-GA-12], Rep. Babin, Brian [R-TX-36], Rep. Baird, James R. [R-IN-4], Rep. Brooks, Mo [R-AL-5], Rep. Byrne, Bradley [R-AL-1], Rep. Carter, Earl L. “Buddy” [R-GA-1], Rep. Chabot, Steve [R-OH-1], Rep. Comer, James [R-KY-1], Rep. DesJarlais, Scott [R-TN-4], Rep. Duncan, Jeff [R-SC-3], Rep. Gibbs, Bob [R-OH-7], Rep. Gohmert, Louie [R-TX-1], Rep. Gosar, Paul A. [R-AZ-4], Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6], Rep. Grothman, Glenn [R-WI-6], Rep. Hice, Jody B. [R-GA-10], Rep. King, Steve [R-IA-4], Rep. LaMalfa, Doug [R-CA-1], Rep. Loudermilk, Barry [R-GA-11], Rep. Massie, Thomas [R-KY-4], Rep. McClintock, Tom [R-CA-4], Rep. Mooney, Alexander X. [R-WV-2], Rep. Norman, Ralph [R-SC-5], Rep. Palazzo, Steven M. [R-MS-4], Rep. Perry, Scott [R-PA-10], Rep. Posey, Bill [R-FL-8], Rep. Smith, Adrian [R-NE-3], Rep. Weber, Randy K., Sr. [R-TX-14] 36 As of October 20, 2022, contributors include Anna Nacher, Benjamin Arenstein, Birgit Kemmerling, Emily Podwoiski, Hoda El Shakry, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, Indrė Liškauskaitė, Işıl Eğrikavuk, Jacob Leveton, Jenna Crowder, Jennifer Sabir, Joe Hall, Katerina Fojtikova, Kay Heikkinen, Laura Kraftowitz, Leah Feldman, Luísa Santos, Megan Jones, Nava Waxman, Nini Ayach, Serge Bouchardon, Shatha Aldeghady, Stefan Jonsson, and anonymous contributors. 37 See the invitation at A Language Act, https://amiraha.com/language-act 38 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 216. 39 M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis,” in Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 317. 40 Luce Irigaray and Carolyn Burke, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” Signs 6, no. 1 (1980), 69–79.

Bibliography Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995. Arndt, Karl J. R. “German as the Official Language of the United States of America?” Monatshefte 68, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 130. Bakhtin, M. M. “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis.” In Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Bleich, David. The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Bucklin Bishop, Joseph, ed. Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters, Vol. II, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. Crawford, James. Language Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Congress.gov. “Text—H.R.997–116th Congress (2019–2020): English Language Unity Act of 2019.” March 22, 2019. www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/997/text. “Extremist Files: John Tanton.” Southern Poverty Law Center. Accessed January  23, 2023. www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/john-tanton.

50  Amira Hanafi

García, Ofelia. “Decolonizing Foreign, Second, Heritage, and First Languages: Implications for Education.” In The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages, edited by Donaldo Macedo. New York: Routledge, 2019. García, Ofelia. “Theorizing Translanguaging for Educators.” In Translanguaging: A CUNY-NYSIEB Guide for Educators, edited by Christina Celic & Kate Seltzer. New York: CUNY-NYSIEB, 2012. García, Ofelia. “Translanguaging, Talk of Prof. Ph.D. Ofelia García on the Subject ‘Translanguaging’ During the Multilingualism & Diversity Lectures 2017.” Accessed October 2, 2022. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l1CcrRrck0. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Hayakawa, S. I. “Sen. Hayakawa’s Speech: U.S. English.” U.S. English, U.S. English, Inc., 18 October 2016. www.usenglish.org/legislation/hayakawa-speech/. Irigaray, Luce, and Carolyn Burke. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs 6, no. 1 (1980): 69–79. Jacobs, Margaret D. A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Jay, John. “Federalist Papers No. 2: Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence.” Independent Journal, October  31, 1787. https://guides.loc.gov/federalistpapers/text-1-10#s-lg-box-wrapper-25493265. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. United States, Lilly and Wait, 1832. Jones, Natasha N., and Miriam F. Williams. “Technologies of Disenfranchisement: Literacy Tests and Black Voters in the US from 1890 to 1965.” Technical Communication 65, no 4 (November 2018). Makoni, Sinfree, and Alastair Pennycook. Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007. Minosh, Peter. “American Architecture in the Black Atlantic: William Thornton’s Design for the United States Capitol.” In Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. “Myths About ProEnglish.” Accessed October 4, 2022. https://proenglish.org/myths-aboutproenglish/. “ProEnglish: The Nation’s Leading English Language Advocates.” Accessed October 4, 2022. https://proenglish.org/what-is-official-english/. Snyder, Gary. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974. Snyder, Gary. “The Place, the Region, the Commons.” In The Practice of the Wild: Essays. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2020. Thornton, William. Cadmus; or, a Treatise on the Elements of Written Language. London: Printed by R. Aitken and Son for the Author, and Sold by C. Dilly, 1796. Wilson, Mabel O. “Notes on Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Capitol.” Architect Magazine, December  28, 2020. Accessed February  11, 2023. www.architectmagazine.com/ design/notes-on-thomas-jeffersons-virginia-capitol_o.

3 WITHIN AND BEYOND WALLS Marina Otero Verzier in conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi

[Marcelo  ou mentioned in this text abstract that architecture is, in a Y López-Dinardi] way, an institution. I wanted to begin there. [Marina Otero] The understanding of architecture as an edifice is generally associated with stabilizing, normalizing, and institutionalizing practices. [Marcelo] How, then, do we think about the question of the institution if architecture is in itself an institution? [Marina] We could understand architecture as an institution in different ways. Perhaps more directly, by thinking that institutions are a series of conventions that organize a society or a particular group. Following this argument, architecture is an instituting practice. It organizes relations in space and time. At the same time, architecture—as a knowledge and a professional practice—is an institution. The discipline of architecture establishes conventions, customs, habits, guidelines, and regulations around its knowledge and practice. [Marcelo] Yes, these conventions are transmitted, enacted, and perpetuated, giving the impression of stability. [Marina] Absolutely. Often, we confound architecture as an institution (as a discipline) and architecture as an instituting medium (an organizational structure that sometimes materializes in a building). When we think of an institution, generally, a building comes to mind: a parliament, a city hall, or a church. We associate institutions with a particular edifice as we tend to identify architecture with a building. What I have been trying DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-5

52  Marina Otero Verzier in conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi

[Marcelo]



[Marina]



to do—in dialogue with long-standing debates in architecture and institutional critique, is to consider architecture a critical spatial practice beyond the building as fact and ways of instituting beyond the physical edifice.1 Alternatively, in other words, I am questioning the stability of the edifice by moving from the institution as a building to the institution as a practice. In your work, you have explored and practiced what instituting could be, literally and conceptually, inside and outside the institution’s walls. How do we prompt change to existing institutional models? Do we focus on the content and the elements that shape knowledge and, in the process, expect a framework for new institutions to emerge?   We are discussing institutions as forms of governmentality of which architecture is a significant part. However, this is primarily a Western notion of architecture and the institution, particularly relating to the Greek traditions of building institutions, forms of organizations, and societies. The nation-state remains perhaps the keystone of these ideas, only surpassed by religions. Yet, there are other conceptions of what constitutes the backbone for organizing life forms in culture. Indeed. First, let me go back to your comments on positionality. As you mentioned, it is fundamental to acknowledge that we are referring primarily to the Western tradition of architecture and institutions. And yet, my current work is indebted to other traditions. This relates to the other point you made about the organizational forms enacted by institutions and non-institutional forms of life. Our relations respond to and are organized according to customs and statecraft and are enforced by laws. However, we also relate to each other according to rituals that respond to cosmological, circadian, climatic, or environmental relations. Do all these materialize in buildings? Not necessarily. Whereas there are examples in which ritual precedes edifice, architects work under the assumption that it is possible to design buildings capable of instigating new forms of relationality. Architecture, as a discipline, is concerned with forms of governmentality and discipline through spatial and material relations that often coalesce in a building.   Let us look, for instance, at a learning space, such as the classroom. How we design how people sit and where students and teachers are positioned inevitably enacts a particular idea of knowledge transfer that creates a hierarchy between those who

Within and Beyond Walls  53



[Marcelo]

[Marina]

instruct and those who receive instruction. Yet, these relations are constantly redesigned. Examples abound past and present. Kurdish communities in Rojava, for example, have engaged in redesigning the classroom as a less hierarchical space more suitable to their curriculum, promoting gender equality, ecological thinking, and social inclusivity. The parliament in Rojava, a transportable, temporary structure designed by this community and artist Jonas Staal, is also an example of how new values manifest in new spatial organizations and alternative institutions.2   I find fascinating the relations between space, rituals, and governmentality. As you mentioned, I  have devoted a large part of my practice to working with (or being disobedient to) those relations, both as an architect designing institutions or working with institutions in their transformation. And the title of this dialogue—within and beyond walls—results from those experiences. The walls I refer to evidently, are physical and conceptual walls I  have encountered. Walls constructed around spaces and ideas that define insides and outsides, differential spaces, and categories, consequently shaping institutions. Could you elaborate on some of these physical or conceptual walls you encountered? In your earlier work, you researched institutional spaces and practices in the 1960s and 1970s. You were interested in examples that expanded the notion of architecture concerning institution building or buildings—mobile or temporary—performed as institutions. That time coincided with art practices associated with institutional critique, many of which were later adopted and embraced by the institutions that were being questioned in the first place. What are the walls of our time, if different from those? I have been intrigued by institutions without walls and foundations, decentralized institutions, and temporary, transportable environments for a long time. That was the focus of my doctoral thesis titled ‘Evanescent Institutions,’ where I mainly analyzed itinerant cultural institutions. I  revisited mobile museum projects from the early 20th century, the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary examples.3 These architectures fascinated me because they have a different relationship with the land they occupy; they do not have foundations, and some do not even have walls. These buildings parachuted, unfolded in multiple territories, and evolved as they established relations with their surroundings. I  thought

54  Marina Otero Verzier in conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi



[Marcelo] [Marina]

studying them would help me conceive alternative institutional formations. Without walls and foundations, how is the institutional space constructed, I asked?   I looked at unbuilt projects from Archigram but also built examples such as the Otranto Urban Reconstruction workshop by Renzo Piano, a building without walls and foundations that nevertheless brought a permanent transformation to the village of Otranto. Many of these mobile architectures were deployed as technologies carrying information—or the promotion of new technologies like IBM (IBM Traveling Pavilion by Renzo Piano, 1982–1986), education, and entertainment that would inject urban dynamics in so-called culturally isolated places. Along with information, these institutions also brought the values of diverse political ideologies.4 Traveling architecture became a means to structure bodies and territories undergoing significant political changes in a time of transition, exert control over the territory, and promote the values of different, sometimes even opposing, power regimes. For instance, in Spain, the Misiones Pedagógicas (1931–1936) were a fundamental project for the Second Spanish Republic and were followed by the Cátedra Ambulante (1939–1977), a vehicle to spread dictator Francisco Franco’s regime; the Laboratorio di Quartiere in Otranto (1979) was conceived, during the Italian Republic, as a strategy for national reconstruction after World War II; the Centre Pompidou Mobile claimed to represent the values of the French Republic (2011–2013); and the BMW Guggenheim Lab (2011–2013) spanned over three countries and the same number of democratic systems in a time of global social unrest and called for a ‘real democracy.’5 One of the more recent cases you followed in real time was the BMW Guggenheim Lab. Could you expand on that case? Yes, the BMW Guggenheim Lab was a traveling building without walls. It was launched in 2011 during a time characterized by global economic recession and unrest that manifested in anti-government and anti-austerity protests. The Lab was designed by the Japanese architects studio Atelier Bow-Wow and presented as a “combination of think tank, public forum, and community center” that would travel around the globe to reach a broader public beyond the traditional museum visitor.6 This project, I thought, was symptomatic of how institutions captured and appropriated the real democracy movement’s

Within and Beyond Walls  55

FIGURE 3.1 



BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin, Photo Marina Otero Verzier

ethos. I  followed the Lab in its three initial locations: New York, Berlin, and Mumbai. I was interested in understanding what the Lab could do that the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, as a building and institution, could not achieve. I  wanted to analyze how museums conceived these itinerant architectures as a counterpart to their iconic buildings and stabilized grounds.   The so-called “Bilbao Effect” influenced museums in recent times, which promoted architecture’s role as a trigger for financial speculation and apparent cultural growth. However, the post-2008 economic and societal unrest demanded less flashy and expensive models. The Lab was temporary and lightweight and significantly cheaper than a Guggenheim Bilbao,

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[Marcelo]

[Marina]

[Marcelo]

yet, it enabled the institution (Guggenheim Foundation) and the auto company it represented (BMW) to reach places and communities where their corporate buildings would never be installed permanently. I was fascinated by the capacity of this institution to be independent of the ground—facilitated by the capacity to move—and, at the same time, by its potential for turning a museum into a sociopolitical agency. This relocation of cultural production from the interior to urban public spaces happened not without trouble.   As it landed and unfolded in different cities, the Lab had difficulty attuning to its immediate environment. It encountered opposition in New York—albeit not consequential—and specially in Berlin, where it was confronted with protests. On this occasion, there were no apparent walls, not museum white walls, but institutional borders, protocols, regulations, access controls, all forms of inclusion and exclusionary and temporary mechanisms of social order—what I call circulating borders—and more visibly police barriers erected to protect the institutional space from dissenting citizens accusing the Lab of gentrification. Even a building without walls materialized an institutional space prompting its rejection. When describing these relations between the institution without foundations, the building without walls, and the opposition faced by BMW Guggenheim Lab, one realizes that architectural flexibility and temporality do not necessarily facilitate its reception. Shortly after, the Guggenheim also had to cancel the plans to build a new museum in Helsinki, indicating specific resistance against global art institutions, regardless of their architecture. The question is how to respond to the local environment and be situated yet not fall into an essentialist rhetoric. What I  learned by studying these institutions was to see architecture as a temporary constellation of bodies, information, and technologies. In these examples, architecture becomes mostly a set of choreographed relations, giving form to social organizations and, therefore, institutions. The structure might leave or disappear, but the relations could stay. Right. That significantly reveals not only a question of scale but about the significance of the concept of locality today or the relations within a specific territory. Perhaps you can reflect on some of the institutions you worked in, such as Studio-X. I want your thoughts about the possibility of more dispersed and multiple as opposed to centralized, single, and

Within and Beyond Walls  57

[Marina]



[Marcelo] [Marina]

big institutions. Universities—like the one we share, position themselves as ‘global,’ but what does that mean today when everything is globalized? The pandemic evidenced that we are connected biologically to a planetary scale, so what it means to think of the institution as a structure that spans over territories and scales? Let us be concrete and bring some examples of these experiences. Paradoxically, my critical study of institutions led me to work in many of them. Inside them, I tried to put into practice some of the learnings by making structural transformations and testing alternative formations (decentralized models for universities, itinerant museums, and more-than-human cooperatives). Studio-X is a good place to start.7 Mark Wigley conceived it during his deanship at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.   Studio-X was an attempt to create a global network for knowledge sharing. Perhaps its better asset—being an initiative of Columbia University in New York—was also its most significant limitation. It was intended to be a decentralized institution, but the University nevertheless had a prominent position in relation to the local context where the Studio-X operated. Eventually, for different reasons, including a change in leadership, the Studio-X initiative was dismantled, and most of Studio-X’s (in Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, Istanbul, and Tokyo) closed their doors. However, the set of relations that were enacted through those years continued. The institutional framework might have changed, but the connections between these communities and individuals have not, and they continue to evolve and manifest in different projects and initiatives. What about your work at the Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI) and its archive? Let us delve into your attempts at transforming the big institution from within. Yes, let us talk about the archive and its walls. Achille Mbembe writes that archives “encompass both the building itself and the documents stored there.”8 Although archives are not easily accessible, they are the gatekeepers of documents designated as relevant for future generations. They guard memories of a particular moment and a particular society. And as such, archives also are the guardians of conventions, rules that represent societies embedded in the archive’s structure, its priorities and focus, the naming policies, the rules of inclusion or exclusion, and how information is made accessible. Returning

58  Marina Otero Verzier in conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi



[Marcelo]

[Marina]



[Marcelo] [Marina]

to this book’s title—Architecture from Public to Commons— archives are a space where the tension between what is public and what is common is at stake—common memories institutionalized and made public. Making them public does not mean they are common.   As director of the research department at HNI, I  worked closely with the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. Its name already implies a wall. The archive not only defines what is considered relevant for society but also what is Dutch. As a result, more than 97% of the documents included in that archive represent white male architects.9 That is what institutional walls do. It is consequential that they end up archiving and collecting primarily white male architects because that reflects the country’s colonial heritage, conventions, forms of governance, and gendered architectural practice. Whiteness is deep in archives. Right. However, as society changes, the archive should reflect those societal, technological, political, and cultural changes. Heritage ultimately belongs to society, and archives are not neutral and objective; they should be institutions where we have collective negotiations about what we want to keep for future generations.10   That was our aim when HNI’s research and the heritage departments joined forces to inspect the methodologies and ideas that had shaped the collection and constructed a canon. We first focused on the thematic and methodological gaps in the official historiography by identifying actors and stories that had been overlooked, which—as evident by the archive materials—concerned feminisms in architecture, queer perspectives, and the architecture and afterlives of Dutch colonialism. The second phase asked candid questions such as what should be collected today? or what and how should it be preserved? And what are the development of methodologies for including these documents, subjects, and media?11 Making a significant intervention in an archive of more than 4 million drawings and 2.500 models seemed a mission deemed to fail. Nevertheless, we were not interested in undoing the past. On the contrary, the main intention was instigating other institutional practices attuned to society’s aspirations. What was the outcome of this process? I am particularly fond of one of the projects launched under this initiative: Architecture of Appropriation (2015–2021).12 By acknowledging squatting’s spatial and legal practices as

Within and Beyond Walls  59

FIGURE 3.2 Annotation

Sessions During the Making of Architecture of Appropriation, Photo Marina Otero Verzier



architecture, we challenged traditional notions of authorship, property, and in particular, the identification of architecture with an individual auteur. Instead, we thought it was critical to emphasize intersectional, collaborative, and non-normative architectural strategies based on commons. Architecture of Appropriation also celebrated spatial practices of the squatting movement as a case for alternative, non-market-oriented housing policies, something significant in a moment characterized by the housing crisis.   The project attempts to simultaneously contest the identification of architecture with an object of financial speculation, the result of an individual creative act, and to prompt an indepth critical assessment of institutional policies of collecting and preserving, leading to new acquisition policies. For the latter, we worked towards including architectural drawings, interviews, and other material related to Netherlands-based squats in the archive. We prompted a debate about what it means that a State-funded institution such as HNI recognizes as relevant practices that the same State has criminalized.

60  Marina Otero Verzier in conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi

[Marcelo]

[Marina]





 his project questions how much we need the institution to T transition from a place of collection, accumulation, and protection to a place for learning. It is connected to both forms of knowledge production and techniques of governmentality and sovereignty. Archives and collections are constructed on practices of  selecting, an inevitable form of exclusion. Can we challenge these institutional practices and spaces and help them transition to represent contemporary values? Or should we let them disappear in their irrelevance to society and create new ones, more attuned to the current sensitivities and values?   My position around this dilemma has shifted for over a decade now. I  believe in the importance of institutions, and I do not want to be arrogant to think we can suddenly create an institution that will do better than the ones that have been working for centuries. Yet, previously I argued that institutions could be transformed from within, encouraging transfers and relations between the inside and the outside, making the institution more vulnerable and open to different knowledge and practices. This type of transformation is possible, albeit very slowly, and the process is fragile, constantly threatened by the force of inertia. The institutional drive is strong, institutions tend to aim to survive at all costs, and that position of protection prevents them from making structural changes. For example, Architecture of Appropriation was often labeled by HNI’s leadership and in public communications as “speculative” or “experimental”—terminology used to downplay its disruptive potential. In the case of Studio-X, it is an example of the cancelation of a prototype that was successful yet challenging.   These experiences were exciting and relevant, but they also left me with the impression that my work served to temporarily actualize existing institutions, without necessarily bringing long-lasting changes. There is a sense of conservation, a sense of self-preservation of the institution, because there is too much at stake, according to those who belong to it. Paradoxically, that position is likely to lead to an institutional irrelevance and even collapse. I am not saying that changes must be imposed from one day to the other. It is always a long, delicate process. I argue that institutions should accommodate instability and vulnerability in order to adapt to the changes that society demands and experiences. However, we see the opposite

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FIGURE 3.3 Annotation

Sessions During the Making of Architecture of Appropriation, Photo Marina Otero Verzier

[Marcelo]

[Marina]

in most cases, and institutions are the last ones to bring about change. When they do change, the change is often superficial, and only later, after very long processes, sometimes painful for people outside and inside the institution, affect the institution structurally.   Again, it is not that I wish for the collapse of institutions, but it has to be contemplated as one possibility while doing the work; otherwise, we are just preventing their transformation. Remarkably, the architecture of institutions such as museums has mostly stayed the same over almost two centuries despite the many different conceptions of art and the relations we can establish with artworks. Yes. In many cases, spaces keep looking the same, even though society’s needs and programs have evolved. The same happens with archives, still imagined as repositories. The attempts to make them transparent or accessible are often aesthetic or rhetoric, not structural. Think about the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, designed by MVRDV and labeled as “the world’s first publicly accessible museum art storage

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[Marcelo]



[Marina] [Marcelo] [Marina]

facility.”13 I appreciate the effort to make the art world more transparent, but I question if showing the back of paintings or the interior of archives has anything to do with it. Again, profound changes seem destabilizing and are avoided to preserve the edifice of the institution. However, that attitude, I believe, risks making institutions obsolete.   Having encountered those paradoxes and found that institutional inertia is more potent than the willingness to change, I decided to shift my way of operating and instituting differently. My attempts to change walls were futile if not accompanied by a change in foundations. Foundations are important. We can institute without walls, but I  argue we still need a foundation, meaning purpose and structure. It could be a set of modes of relating and connecting, even loose ones; or rituals; or forms of synchronization or attuning with other beings and forces, with the cosmos, cycles of life. Absolutely. This is a great reflection. The scope, extent, and limits of practice are essential in institutions regarding foundations versus walls. I  recall some of the earlier work of Gordon Matta-Clark associated with this unsettling of the institution—architecture as an institution in his earlier work. When he carved out a space in a gallery in New York to reveal the foundations of the building, we see there is a difference between cutting up and through a building versus its foundations.   I also wanted to ask again about institutions’ survival and ideas for the optimization of institutions. Can we think of an institution without permanent foundations, a fragmented institution, a wounded institution? Many institutions are more invested in sustaining themselves than accomplishing the mission they set for them initially. Those are wounded institutions with failing foundations. That reminds me of the history of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, which suffered from some of these illnesses from its foundation. Yes, it is a familiar story. As an institutional worker, it was crucial to practice what I praise. For instance, if we are having public conversations about decolonial thinking, the first question is how to decolonize the institution before even having this conversation and to be able to have this conversation. Otherwise, I see a paradox between what the institution

Within and Beyond Walls  63







communicates and what it does, which could have traumatic consequences. What I was trying to do in institutions where I  worked was to establish forms of instituting that would acknowledge internal and external processes. The challenge was how to do so without becoming too inward-looking, how to be open to what happens around you, receptive, flexible, and at the same time reflective and self-critical. Ultimately, it is a question of being confident but open to being vulnerable and ready for change.   At HNI, we attempted to create this space with the notion of “pilot projects”—I briefly mentioned it earlier in the conversation. We knew that such a national institution would be challenging to transform. Therefore, we thought of designing a programmatic and conceptual space that would allow us to test other forms of instituting within the institution. We created a testing ground to nourish, grow and care for prototypes of future institutions with the idea that some could develop further and eventually take over the established institution and make it redundant. Regardless, it could also be that we will learn aspects from these prototypes that could be incorporated into and modify the existing institutions.   The problem is that institutions tend to be driven by inertia and make these prototypes stay as prototypes. So, to keep these experiments going and scale them up or make their learning drivers of the general infrastructure was a titanic endeavor. But then, after you have tried for years, you say, wait a minute, I am exhausted from trying to resist institutional inertia. We felt like Sisyphus.   There was a time when I was attracted to this impossible challenge, and I still admire those who kept trying. Nevertheless, I  am learning to work differently and not to break my body under an institutional rock. Instead of resisting inertia, I want to be more proactive. I am also questioning my role as a representative of an institution with a position of authority in the field. I am interested in forms of instituting that are not necessarily devoted to transforming existing institutions and focusing instead on nurturing more horizontal relations and forms of solidarity and allyship. Can we organize something a bit humbler that it is not scared of failure and acknowledges that to exist depends on many others? A network where none of those institutions tries to solve it all, but they relate to and

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[Marina]

learn from each other and, in specific ways, establish forms of collaboration and interdependency. Knowing your work, you are very interested in practice and implementation. You had the opportunity to experience working with institutions and genuinely engaging with these questions. You engaged not only with institutional practices but also with institutional spaces and how these were practiced. As we said earlier, architecture has a significant role in organizing, relating, and instituting.   This book, and in my work as well, considers the architectural institution as an edifice. One of the main questions it poses is how we practice architecture, how we come together, and how we produce together at different scales. It is a fundamental question, and for someone like me who teaches at a university, it is critical. I  prefer to avoid reproducing a model of practice that is no longer attuned to contemporary challenges. For instance, we still value the genius and the significance of an individual’s voice—as you mentioned when talking about HNI’s archive. Do we have to rethink the way we practice radically? I am talking about very pragmatic protocols, such as degrees, how we arrange a class and a studio, or how many years a formal education should take; aspects that define how we come together and guide us when we wake up and decide how to work. My institutional experiences also shaped how I  understand architecture and my role as an architect. The architect is not only an author but a steward of the built environment, one who cares, reorganizes, maintains, and eventually supports necessary changes that make life flourish in those spaces. Unfortunately, architecture has been too entangled with agents and industries that see it as a means to make a profit. Architects’ aim should be not making profits but designing for a good life for el Buen Vivir.14 Most architects do not make much profit anyway but help others make money, generally not those who most need it. In the process of creating inequality, they also damage the planet. Architecture is too often—not to say inevitably at the expense of destroying and extracting natural resources and communities. Even the practices of mainstream architectural care are generally associated with extraction: we renovate to facilitate gentrification, consequently expulsion, and make a profit in the process, not to make the life of the existing inhabitants better.

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[Marcelo]

[Marina]

[Marcelo]

[Marina]



  If architects aim to be relevant for contemporary struggles, we may have to disentangle the practice of architecture from the business of architecture. To do so, we must collectively acknowledge that the conventions that have guided architectural practice for many decades are obsolete. I am not saying they were irrelevant, but they might be now. They are ruins, and we must give ourselves the space and time to say goodbye, mourn those forms of practice, and embrace different ones. We have seen the effects and the impact of these outmoded forms of architectural practice; we need renewed forms of engagement to the challenges connected to the climate emergency, which is also a political emergency. Yes, we need a humbler position, acknowledging that we cannot tame the planet and instrumentalize it entirely as we have tried until now under the false premise of progress. We must recognize our vulnerability and precarity and focus on embracing other notions of quality and good life. Practically speaking, regulated architectural education is giving degrees for a profession that will be rendered irrelevant soon. We must reconsider where the focus of architectural practices should be. Absolutely. Much knowledge, production, education, and practice models will soon be obsolete. I appreciate the ideas you bring around stewardship as a way of thinking about practice, and it aligns well with the central premises of this book. There is an acknowledgment of relations not based on property or ownership and practices of care that are not only about people or the public. Buildings are entangled with property and ownership and enact a sense of entitlement to the land they occupy. Architecture is presented as something that can be owned and built on land that could be owned by someone and by materials labeled as commodities so they can also be owned—thinking of architectural practice as stewardship is a way to remind us that we do not own anything and that our role is also to care for this place in the name of past, present, and future generations.15 This understanding shatters the foundations of architecture, as it questions building as its primary practice.   When I  started the research on temporary and traveling institutions, I  did not see at first that even if they did not have a relation of property with the ground, their ethos was

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[Marcelo]

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nevertheless extractive—with the local space, populations, and the environment. They were not organized around practices of care and stewardship.   I am drawn by my friend and designer Maren Bang Tøndevold’s idea for an institution. She explained to me recently that she thinks of an institution that would cross-dress as other institutions depending on the community’s needs: one day, a gallery; another day, a museum or community center, or bar. She is creating a series of fabric-made dresses for each institution and carrying them in a bag. Walls temporarily change without significant material transformations, and the foundations, the common ground—the institution’s mission to serve and care for a community’s needs and aspirations—are there embodied by the community. We need to be creative and find other models. Should we then allow the current forms of practice and institutions to decay or ruin? How do we learn to live with those ruins? I  think of our time as a long transitional project; we will coexist with these ruins while new structures are formed. I like your reference to mourning as an intrinsic part of our work in the years ahead. How else could we help in those transitions? The institutional and architectural practice I  stand for recognizes the inevitability of decay, the care needed to deal with this decay, the importance of collectively deciding what should be maintained and preserved, and the need for mourning processes to let things (and conventions) go.   I often think of and practice these processes, as I live in a house over 100 years old. It leaks, cracks, and moves. Initially, I  felt anxiety about this continuous decay of my immediate environment and was exhausted from maintaining and caring for it daily. However, I finally understood that this is the type of architectural practice I  believe in. We need compassion for this imperfect, ruined world, as our bodies are also in a slow process of ruination. As I devote time to the maintenance of this edifice, I  acknowledge the lives of others who were before me and those who will come after. With each crack and leak, with new layers of pipes and cables, the architecture and those living in it change with it, even if we keep the illusion of stability. How this house operates and its institutional logic differs from what it was 100 years ago—it does not revolve

Within and Beyond Walls  67





around a patriarchal family structure. Maintenance does not equal conservation.   Regarding how to live through these transitions, I  would refer to the work of Mexican artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo. She works with the ‘despojo,’ the exploited, extracted, and dispossessed territories. She does so from a feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist critique of Eurocentrism, extractivism, and progress.16 I  have learned from her the importance of desire. A desire for alternative worlds and ways of life. A desire for the “creation of counter-worlds,” as she puts it. This desire I am talking about is not a compulsive desire for capitalist consumption that appropriates imagination, land, bodies, and relationships and incites individualism and selfishness. Instead, this desire prompts us to establish connections, interweave and build each other. An erotic desire that, as biologist Andreas Weber reminds us, is a necessary drive for life.17 This erotic desire inspires us to break the usual patterns, the tendency to instrumentalize the planet and subjugate it to the doctrine of economic profit. Instead, it invites us to practice other forms of existence and relationality with the earth and its beings.   Rincón Gallardo not only proposes to give oneself the thirst for desire in the middle of a ruined world, but she also talks about the importance of anger in the face of inertia.18 We have reasons to be furious at how we live, work, produce, and consume, and we have created a world that eliminates possible futures for humans and non-humans. This fury should also be expressed. According to Rincón Gallardo, revenge is celebrating and desiring when one has been condemned to nonexistence. As we protest, mourn, and celebrate, as we embody and care for the ruin of our bodies and other bodies and territories, we will, I hope, find a way out of and beyond the walls of inertia.

Notes 1 See for instance the work of Jane Rendell, on ‘critical spatial practices’ at the intersection of theory and practice, public and private, art and architecture (2006) and the book series by Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen with Sternberg Press called “Critical Spatial Practice” initiated in 2011 and that includes works by authors such as Felicity D. Scott, Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina, Keller Easterling, and Eyal Weizman. The work of Michael Foucault on the relations between space, knowledge, and power has been fundamental for these contemporary debates addressing institutions, biopolitics, and governmentality.

68  Marina Otero Verzier in conversation with Marcelo López-Dinardi

2 See New World Summit—Rojava by The Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava and Studio Jonas Staal, 2015–2018, www.jonasstaal.nl/projects/new-worldsummit-rojava/. 3 Marina Otero Verzier, “Evanescent Institutions: Political Implications of an Itinerant Architecture” (Ph.D diss., Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, 2016). 4 Ibid. See also Marina Otero Verzier, “Circulating Borders: The Architecture of Global Cultural Institutions,” in Out—nomy, publication of the Critic|all II International Conference on Architectural Design & Criticism (Madrid: ETSAM, 2018); Marina Otero Verzier, “Circulating Borders: The Architecture of Global Cultural Institutions,” in Palermo Atlas, Manifesta 12 (Milan: Humboldt Books, 2018); Marina Otero ­Verzier, “Arquitecturas para la democracia o máquinas de propaganda,” CIRCO 228 (February 2017). 5 Ibid. 6 Marina Otero Verzier, “Circulating Borders: The BMW Guggenheim Lab,” Mas Context 27 (December 18, 2015): 188–93, www.mascontext.com/tag/marina-otero/; Marina Otero Verzier, “Aterrizajes: el BMW Guggenheim Lab,” CIRCO 180, La Libertad de los Fragmentos, Madrid (July  2012), www.mansilla-tunon.com/circo/ epoca8/pdf/2012_180.pdf. 7 See www.arch.columbia.edu/studio-x. 8 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton et  al. (Cape Town: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 19. 9 The State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning is one of the world’s largest architecture collections. It hosts 1.4 million drawings, 300.000 photographs, 2.500 models, 70.000 books and magazines, alongside correspondence, posters, and other documents of Dutch architects and urban planners. Of all the documents that compose the State Archive, white, male architects author 97% of them, with only 26 of 835 archives attributed to female architects. See “Search the Collection,” Het Nieuwe Instituut online portal, accessed December  20, 2022, https://collectie.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/search-collection. See also Building HERitage, Het Nieuwe Instituut online portal, accessed December  20, 2022, https://thursdaynight.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/activities/building-heritage. 10 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 11 Marina Otero Verzier, “Archival Fault Lines. On the Inclusion of Nonauthor-based, Precarious, and Criminalized Spatial Practices in the Archive,” kritische berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 50 (2022): 87–97. 12 Architecture of Appropriation was initiated at Het Nieuwe Instituut’s research department, for which I  was director from 2015–2022. It has previously been presented in public events and informed the book Architecture of Appropriation. On Squatting as Spatial Practice, ed. by René Boer, Marina Otero Verzier, Katía Truijen, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam 2019, accessed December 20, 2021, https://architecture-­ appropriation.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/publication. See also Architecture of Appropriation, Het Nieuwe Instituut online portal, accessed December  20, 2022, https:// architectureappropriation. hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en. 13 See: www.boijmans.nl/en/depot/plan-your-depot-visit 14 El Buen Vivir is a decolonial stance that, according to leading proponent Eduardo Gudynas, calls for new ethics that balances quality of life, and the democratization of the state. See Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen vivir: germinando alternativas al desarrollo,” América Latina en Movimiento, ALAI 462 (2011): 1–20. See also Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Words (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

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15 Here I  am particularly referring to the words of indigenous leader from Atacama (Chile) Rolando Humire as published in Francisco Díaz, Anastasia Kubrak, and Marina Otero Verzier, eds., Lithium: States of Exhaustion (Rotterdam: Het Nieuwe Instituut; Santiago: Ediciones ARQ, 2021), 9, 31. 16 See Naomi Rincón Gallardo: www.naomirincongallardo.net/ 17 Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (River Junction: Chelsea Green, in print; US English edition of Lebendigkeit, 2014). 18 Anette Baldauf, Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Sílvia Das Fadas, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, İpek Hamzaoğlu, Janine Jembere, Rojda Tuğrul, and (Willful Weeds Research Group), eds., A Pesar del Despojo. Un Libro de Actividades (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2021).

Bibliography Baldauf, Anette, Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Sílvia Das Fadas, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, İpek Hamzaoğlu, Janine Jembere, and Rojda Tuğrul (Willful Weeds Research Group), eds. A Pesar del Despojo. Un Libro de Actividades. Berlin: K. Verlag, 2021. Boer, René, Marina Otero Verzier, and Katía Truijen, eds. Architecture of Appropriation: On Squatting as Spatial Practice. Rotterdam: Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2019. Accessed December  20, 2021. https://architecture-appropriation.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/ publication. Building HERitage, Het Nieuwe Instituut Online Portal. Accessed December 20, 2022. https://thursdaynight.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/activities/building-heritage. Díaz, Francisco, Anastasia Kubrak, and Marina Otero Verzier, eds. Lithium: States of Exhaustion. Rotterdam: Het Nieuwe Instituut; Santiago: Ediciones ARQ, 2021. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Words. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Gudynas, Eduardo. “Buen vivir: germinando alternativas al desarrollo.” América Latina en Movimiento, ALAI 462 (2011). Het Nieuwe Instituut Online Portal. Accessed December 20, 2022. https://collectie.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/search-collection. Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” en Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, et  al. Cape Town: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Otero Verzier, Marina. “Archival Fault Lines. On the Inclusion of Nonauthor-Based, Precarious, and Criminalized Spatial Practices in the Archive.” kritische berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 50 (2022). Otero Verzier, Marina. “Arquitecturas para la democracia o máquinas de propaganda.” CIRCO 228, Los Límites de lo Urbano, Madrid, February 2017. Otero Verzier, Marina. “Aterrizajes: el BMW Guggenheim Lab.” CIRCO 180 (July 2012). www.mansilla-tunon.com/circo/epoca8/pdf/2012_180.pdf. Otero Verzier, Marina. “Circulating Borders: The Architecture of Global Cultural Institutions.” In Out—Nomy, Publication of the Critic|all II International Conference on Architectural Design & Criticism. Madrid: ETSAM (Escuela Superior Técnica de Arquitectura de Madrid), 2018. Otero Verzier, Marina. “Circulating Borders: The BMW Guggenheim Lab.” Mas Context 27 (December 18, 2015). www.mascontext.com/tag/marina-otero/.

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Otero Verzier, Marina. “Evanescent Institutions: Political Implications of an Itinerant Architecture.” Ph.D. diss., Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, 2016. Smith, Laurajane. Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Weber, Andreas Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology. Translated by Rory Bradley. River Junction: Chelsea Green, Lebendigkeit, 2017.

4 COMMON GOODS Reanimation of Lost Industrial Design Objects in Allende’s Chile Fernando Portal

In the spring of 2019, a new LP record player by the home appliances brand IRT arrived at the ports, department stores and homes of Chile. The product was promoted highlighting its “retro” and “vintage” character, wrapping the player in a double halo of nostalgia: the return of an obsolete format, and its materialization through a design that directly referenced the styling practices of post-war industrial design, taking its inspiration from the Bermuda model of the English company Dansette, from 1962. However, this double nostalgia of its function and form does not exhaust the contradictions embodied by this technical object, as it is far from being the first record player marketed by the brand in Chile. The company IRT, acronym for Industria de Radio y Televisión (Radio and Television Industry), was created by the Chilean State in 1971 for the production and distribution of electrical appliances and vinyl records for domestic and Latin American markets. Although its catalogue included several record players, which can still be found at flea markets, there is one model that is absent: a design that never entered production due to the violent interruption of the political and developmental path of which this technical object was part of. Chile’s military and civil coup of 1973 had changed the course even of seemingly common design objects. Thus, the nostalgia provoked by IRT’s latest import—now through RCL Sudamericana S.A., manifests itself as a mechanism able of obliterating our own remembrance, thereby transforming our memory. A forgetfulness that shares with amnesia being a response to the trauma triggered by the coup d’état of 1973, and the 18 years of civic-military dictatorship that followed the violent overturn of the Unidad Popular government, a left-wing alliance led by Salvador DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-6

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FIGURE 4.1 

IRT Record Player Styled After Dansette Bermuda From 1962

Source: IRT Catalogue, 2019

Allende. After 50  years, the events continue to define the country’s political debate and horizon. The coup d’état not only marked the end of a political project that proposed a democratic transition towards socialism, it also put an end to the industrialization-led developmentalist project that guided the modern economic and cultural development of Chile since the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, after the coup and based on the brutal and authoritarian exercise of force by the dictatorship, Chile became—as it is commonly known now, a laboratory for the early implementation of neoliberal policies.1 These policies among other things dismembered and privatized the country’s emerging industrial platform. A platform developed through decades of adherence to industrialization models, such as the import substitution policies promoted by ECLAC—the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

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This deindustrialization process implied to quit the search for technological independence as a horizon of development. Thus, the economic policies implemented by the dictatorship after its ascription to the neoliberal model proposed by Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, opened the country as a market for the trade of imported goods, discouraging local manufacturing in pursuit of importing and marketing foreign products.2 These measures sealed the subordinate commercial role of the country as one limited to the export of nonrenewable natural resources with low added value. As such, these policies not only had high economic and social costs in the times of its implementation in the early 1970s3 but also in the present days, as have been witnessed in the tensions related to the recent constitutional process. In this scenario, the nostalgia produced by the 2019 IRT record player acts as a mechanism to forget, overwriting our own memory. An oblivion is only one dimension of this loss, as from our subordinate condition we allow ourselves to be carried away and completed by the memories that conform a history of design that proposes itself as universal.4 One to which we should therefore belong, putting aside our own history and identity, and adopting other’s memories as our own. Critical questions about the common proprietary, and commons value of goods produced under a socialist framework arise in this context. Against this “yearning of the marginalized,”5 the Common Goods project that serves as spine to this text, a practice-based research supported by public funds grants in 2017, has sought to recover our memory and to decolonize our nostalgia through the material restitution of a series of technical objects designed by the Chilean State during the government of Salvador Allende. Objects that for the most part were never produced—although fully designed—due to the deindustrialization process imposed by the dictatorship. Unrealized objects whose design rehearsed the material and technological culture proper to the Chilean road to socialism, opening up an inquiry as commons objects, with a shared, collective ontology. As the conceptual and historical input of these designs had lacked a concrete material body through which to have agency, they have remained alien to the cultural imaginary of the country. By channeling this input through its contemporary manifestation in a new body, or object, the project has performed a kind of spiritualism, a reanimation. It has provided a set of experiences confined to long forgotten drawings to take on new bodies enabling them to be visible, to trouble its historiographic account and to be incorporated as national material heritage. To achieve these goals the project has attended to the conditions of exposure and value given to this new set of objects, while plotting for its right ownership. In this way, the creation of common goods by means of this artistic research has involved adding a new iteration to a long sequence of transfers between public and private ownership. Transfers associated with the opposite paths of development the country has traversed since the beginning of the 20th century.

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To review these transfers, we will unfold this project through the account of two very different IRT record players. IRT and the Nationalization of Industries

The record player offered by the IRT brand in 2019 had a diverse origin. It is a generic design produced massively by an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) in China, which is imported globally by different distribution companies under their own brands. In this industrial model, distribution companies do not produce, manufacture, or assemble these products. Instead, they distribute the imported goods in national or regional markets with low industrialization and/or low purchasing power. In Chile, this record player is distributed by RCL Sudamericana S.A., a Chilean company that acquired the IRT brand rights in 1991. However, this brand originates in a very different context. IRT was the name given to the former Chilean subsidiary of RCA Victor—RCA Electrónica S.A.— on October 1st, 1970.6 It was renamed after the acquisition of 51% of its shares by the Chilean State. RCA Victor operated in the country since 1928, manufacturing radios, phonographs, and acetates, to later produce record players and vinyl records, based on the production of local components.7 Its acquisition was part of the first actions carried out by the Unidad Popular government with the aim of “diversifying and deconcentrating the ownership of industrial, distribution and marketing companies.”8 It sought to transfer industrial ownership out of its concentration into foreign and national capitals,9 and towards national public ownership. This goal was carried out through the Production Development Corporation (Corporación de Fomento, CORFO)— a department of the Ministry of Economy—and in the case of the IRT, by its recently formed Sectoral Committee for Electrical and Electronic Industries, mainly through acquisitions or requisitions.10 Taking control and ownership of enterprises of previously national and international ownership played a “decisive role in the creation of a social area in all economic and productive sectors.”11 For the State to gain this ownership meant to “take control of numerous companies and economic activities that constitute strategic points for the culmination of all the goals contemplated in the economic and social development program of the government.”12 These actions implied the creation of both a mixed area—in which the government had control but shared ownership, as in the case of the IRT, and a social area with full national ownership. The broad development of these areas implied that at the end of the Unidad Popular government, the State had participation in 620 companies, whereas at the beginning of the government, it had only participated in the ownership of six companies.13 In the case of IRT, the acquisition of most of the property was accompanied by a collaboration agreement with RCA International Ltd., who would provide technical advice to the State control and who would proportionally share the

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investment in the company. An agreement that “constitutes unquestionable support and great confidence for the industrial development plans that are contemplated in the Unidad Popular Government Program.”14 For the government, the public ownership of IRT would allow the State to develop its own technologies and the ability to coordinate the production of electronic products both for internal consumption and external trade. Through these means, the government hoped to achieve the long-sought technological independence, understood as a tool for the development and autonomy of peripheral countries, against the hegemony of central countries of the north. Also, to this end ILESCO, an IRT assembly plant in the city of Arica in the extreme north of the country, was also developed. However, these were not the only results expected from its operation. The Unidad Popular demands for cultural transformation imprinted two complementary objectives: the development of low-priced “popular” products (CORFO, 1971:4), and the construction of a new cultural identity. The objectives were intertwined in the development of two projects. The first one is the Antú, a 12-inch black and white television, which displayed the national coat of arms on its front panel, together with the inscription Hecho en Chile (Made in Chile). As such, the Antú was part of a plan to deliver media and culture into the popular masses.15 It was developed as a low-priced product to be distributed both in national and international markets, as well as in the “social market.” The latter was a consumption redistribution strategy that involved “the direct delivery of goods outside of market mechanisms”16 which implied the distribution of Antú through unions, mothers’ centers, and popular organizations.17 The second experience is associated with the management of the IRT record label, heir to the RCA Victor catalogue, that also became the main label for the development of the New Chilean Song.18 This genre was part of the New Song, a politically committed wave of left-wing Latin American music, that in the case of Chile not only rescues indigenous instruments,19 but it also delivers the soundtrack and the visual imaginary—through the colorful cover designs by the Larrea brothers—to the democratic revolution proposed by the Unidad Popular. Since IRT nationalization and until the overthrown of Allende’s government, the label developed a rich record catalogue, reaching the printing of 6.3 million vinyl records in 1972.20 Additionally, it reached the production of 100,000 units of Antú,21 while the company continued with the production of different record players based on original RCA Victor models, such as Capíssimo, based on the RCA Nova, and the Stereovox and MusicVox, based on RCA models of the same name. Privatization and Deindustrialization

The economic policies imposed by the dictatorship sought to undo the changes developed in the country’s property structure as part of the modern developmentalist project. These involved reversing both agricultural land redistribution

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policies implemented during the government of Eduardo Frei through the Agrarian Reform (1964–1970) as well as industry nationalization policies. It also fostered the early adoption of neoliberal policies deploying measures “aimed essentially at establishing a free market economy, opening them up, promoting exports, liberalizing prices, privatizing state enterprises and promotion of foreign investment.”22 These measures affected, as it was intended, the ownership and program of the IRT. On the one hand, new fiscal measures gave advantage for the import of electronic products to the detriment of domestically manufactured ones. These actions dismantled the financial and commercial conditions fostered to develop a national industry of electronic components and products. On the other hand, the disassociation of the State from economic control over production and markets implied the privatization of State companies, through a violent model of return, sale, and liquidation of public assets. A privatization model that has had serious consequences in the concentration of wealth in Chile due to the acquisition of strategic national companies by monopoly economic groups.23 However, the dismantling of economic conditions favorable to the generation of an electronics industry in Chile left the IRT adrift and away from the interest of any economic group. In this context, the production of the national industry decreased, reducing the exporting of certain products including electronics. Achieved after Chile’s withdraw from the Andean Pact in 1976, a free trade agreement associated with the Andes Range countries’ in which Chile had control over electronics. In the cultural sphere, the repressive climate of the dictatorship affected the production of records and books through explicit and implicit strategies of destruction, censorship, and prohibition for producing, distributing, and performing content associated with policies and cultural content identifiable with left-wing politics or understood as a legacy of Allende’s socialist ideals.24 Through legislation implemented by the military Junta for the reprivatization of public assets, CORFO’s new Normalization Management acquired all shares of the IRT in 1975, after RCA’s rejection of the State proposal for return. The same year a first request for bids of the company was declared void, while economic groups were acquiring at prices well below the market, the main economic and industrial assets developed by the country’s modern industrialization project. In a second request for bids in 1976, the company was acquired by Colorado Radio and Televisao do Brasil S.A., in a context described by the IRT General Manager Julio del Río as one in which “the new rules say that by 1978, it does not justify, at all, the industry in Arica, nor is the industry justified in Santiago, since it is cheaper to import televisions, radios, etc.”25 After the bankruptcy of Colorado in 1978, the IRT returned to CORFO, closing ILESCO and migrating towards an import and distribution model. In 1979 a new request for bids left the IRT in the hands of Chilean businessmen Emilio Rojas and Germán Olave, who, affected by the credit and market conditions that led to the economic

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crisis of 1982, filed for bankruptcy in the same year; that process ended in 1985 with the total liquidation of the IRT assets—including its factory, record label, and brand. After the sale of all its tangible assets a series of legal disputes between their controllers defined different outcomes for what is known as their intangible assets. The IRT’s record label stopped production in 1980, allowing RCA Victor to reissue some records from the catalogue between 1982 and 1991, while other records became the property of Alba records. In 1991 Chilean businessman Pedro Valdebenito Durán obtained the general license for both RCA Nacional and IRT catalogues, and all rights to the IRT catalogue in 1996, founding the ARCI label.26 For its part, IRT’s brand was acquired in 1993 by Radio Center Limitada, a company incorporated in Chile that same year, and which today operates under the name of RCL Sudamericana, importing and distributing in Chile generic electronic products made in China under its brand IRT. Industrial Design as Commoning Practice

The authoritarian interruption of Chile’s democratically elected 1970s government, the dismantling of the electronic industry, and the privatization of its ownership and coordination not only impeded the country from generating its own technologies and products, they reduced the reach of industrial design as a vector of its modernization. Although the development of low-cost technical objects for the popular market was partially achieved with the Antú TV set, industrial design was not linked with this industry before its dismantling. As was the case with the IRT, even during its operation by the State, most of the nationalized companies continued to produce models designed abroad and already installed on the production lines of their respective local factories. Confronted with these facts, questions regarding the design of the material culture of socialism, and of the technical objects proper to the life and market models proposed by socialism were raised but not developed. Who can claim ownership, authorship, if at all, of design products conceived under a socialist framework of intended collective proprietary? Is technological independence something achievable through the development of common goods? Can these objects confront its commodification if they circulate in “non-competitive”27 markets? These questions were posed by the concrete experience of the Grupo de Diseño Industrial (Industrial Design Group) a project development office housed within CORFO, as part of INTEC, its Technological Research Committee. Faced with the nationalization of industries, the objective of the Group was to design objects to be developed by the national industry and intended as part of industrial and social policies. The Group’s approach was driven by the experience of its director, the German designer Gui Bonsiepe, who arrived in Chile in

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1968 as an expert hired by UN’s International Labor Organization (ILO), after the closing of the academic and politically charged project of the short lived Hfg Ulm, a radical design school of which he was part along with designers and intellectuals such as Tomás Maldonado, Abraham Moles, and Max Bense. While previous publications originated by the Common Goods project have already addressed the methodological transfers between the critical theory developed at the Hfg Ulm and the Design Group,28 the analysis of the designs produced by the group,29 and the trajectories of its Chilean members,30 it is worth elaborating on a key reflection to contextualize the design purpose in the projects developed, an emancipatory socio-political project. This reflection addresses the critical theory proposed by the Ulm school in relation to the recognition of a crisis in design, resulting from its instrumentalization by capitalist modes of production.31 Within this framework, by constantly and exclusively aiming at the promotion of consumption, they argued, design has been limited to styling, turning it into a tool to fulfill industries’ much-needed obsolescence of its own products. The limiting of design was confronted by the school’s own theoretical and pedagogical agenda, leading to economic and political tensions that ended with the closing of the school in 1968. The development of its critical theory32 led to the identification that the conditions for the development of design as a tool for emancipation would not be possible to find, or produce in capitalist societies, but rather in “non-competitive” ones, those where the designer could “attempt to shake the artificially preserved stability of these products.”33 This is the vision that leads Bonsiepe’s project in CORFO, to have “tried via design to transfer the emancipatory socio-political project of the Unidad Popular directly into the technical process—an approach in which they saw a new legitimization for design.”34 Since its foundation in June 1970 and till the coup in 1973, the Design Group developed around 25 projects, considering the design of more than 100 objects to be produced by the nationalized industrial platform. Despite the multitude of objects designed, only two projects entered production.35 The projects were organized into three categories: capital goods, intended for the development and adaptation of equipment for productive activities associated with the internal supply of machinery and raw materials; goods for public use, made up of objects and equipment for the implementation of programs and public policies; and third, goods for popular consumption, within which different products for everyday life use were designed, including some to be produced by the IRT.36 One of the consumer goods designed by the Group consisted of the design of a cabinet for a portable record player, sponsored by the IRT and by CORFO’s Center for Electronic Technology and Quality Control (CETEC). The project considered the design of the cabinet, its knobs, and graphic elements. Its electronic components would be the ones already in use at IRT’s assembly lines and inherited from the development of RCA models.

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The record player design report (Grupo de Proyecto Diseño Industrial, 1972) declares the turntable as a product intended for popular consumption with a production of 100,000 units, matching it with the reach planned for the Antú TV set. However, its development exposes some of the possible contradictions of such actions within this political project. On the one hand, it is presented as an economic product oriented to the social market “offer[ing] a product for social use in community meeting rooms, kindergartens and so on”37 while at the same time, it was presented as a tool to absorb a financial surplus of the wealthy classes through consumption (Bonsiepe 2010:20). The turntable’s design was introduced in November 1972, but it never entered production in IRT’s manufacture facilities. Channeling Materials and Images

One main component of the Common Goods research project was to consider the materialization of some of the objects that were never manufactured. This was made possible after the presentation in 2013 of a series of design reports of the projects developed by the Design Group, by designer Rodrigo Walker, a member of the Group who salvaged the documents on the days following the coup. With his and Bonsiepe’s support and after receiving the necessary rights from Fundación Chile—a non-for-profit private corporation founded in 1976 through a joint agreement between the Chilean government and the ITT ­Corporation—who acquired INTEC’s intellectual property, the research project applied for public funding through a FONDART Research Grant from the Ministry of the Arts, Cultures and Heritage in 2015. The recreation process revealed the need, and challenge, to critically inquiry and devise manufacturing tools of our times with those of the early 1970s. Each of the IRT’s designed objects selected for recreation, or reanimation, as part of the Common Goods project involved the study and design of specific fabrication processes to achieve a viable degree of fidelity to the original design intentions. These processes and techniques included carpentry work for furniture, molds generation for emptying ceramics and plastics, and obtaining electronic components manufactured in former Soviet republics.38 These processes defined the distance between the design living in the ­documents—with their uneven levels of resolution and detail—and the inevitable new objects to be built, after following their original reports as if they were assembly instructions. The main condition of this conceptual distance stems from the fact that the original objects were conceived for mass production in an industrialized way, while their reconstruction had the scope of a short series. While advances in 3D printing have enabled the low-cost generation of molds for casting ceramics and plastics, in many cases it has not been possible to manufacture the components of the designs through the types of industrial processes

FIGURE 4.2 Atlas

of All 99 Images Produced and Published by the Design Group and Disseminated Through Official and Specialized Publications Between 1971 and 2017

Source: Portal, Fernando. (Ed.) 2018. Bienes Públicos. Recreación de un archivo de diseño y política en Chile. 1970–1973, Self-published. © Fernando Portal

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FIGURE 4.3 

Schematics for Record Player Design

FIGURE 4.4 

Manufacture of Record Player Cases

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for which they were designed. For example, in the case of the record player, both casing pieces were designed for injection molding in high-impact polystyrene (HIPS), which involved the development of matrices common to industrial methods. Due to the project’s limited reconstruction budget, this option was not viable, instead, a CNC, laminar wooden mold was manufactured for the artisanal production of fiberglass shells. For the reconstructed record player to be fully operational, IRT 5-VT-2 models, also known as Capíssimo, were sought, obtaining two specimens, with serial numbers 431980 and 295239.39 As the design of the turntable considered relocating the knobs based on ergonomic criteria, the components of both turntables were disassembled and redistributed based on the new design of the metal cabinet mounting plate. Furthermore, the photographs of the prototype developed by INTEC provided additional information to the specifications provided in the design report, such as the position of the power/volume and speed change knobs, the final arrangement of graphic elements such as the IRT logo, and texts associated with the knobs, and the position and size of the legend Hecho en Chile (Made in Chile). The transferring of these designs into their new material bodies meant granting them agency to reenter culture. In this operation, they transformed their mostly forgotten memory by inserting themselves into a heritage of objects designed in the name of all Chileans, a commons good. Although they were primarily reintroduced to a national audience, their existence contributes to an international archive, of the public—or common objects conceived under socialist imaginaries. Originally present only in public documents with little circulation and in a limited set of photographs of destroyed prototypes, distributed in specialized publications, the ideas present in their forms can today be distributed and perceived with a greater scope, through both the circulation of its images and the exhibition of the objects. The emerging and renewed forms of circulation and exposure conditions of the reconstructed artifacts became central to the project’s critical outlook. These artifacts’ ideas have circulated in image form and kept for 45 years, defining their visual and symbolic context. The new images product of the documentation of the newly manufactured objects as part of Common Goods served as framework to relaunch them. The new set of images unfold in continuity with the original images, and at the same time, allowed to account for the concretion of its materiality, the photographic record of the new collection was developed using as a guide the original set of photographs of the prototypes built by INTEC. The initial selection of the objects to be built as part of the project considered, among other variables, whether they had a photographic record of their original prototype, allowing a visual reanimation. Subsequently, the original photographs were taken as a guide for the framing, optics, and lighting of the shot.

FIGURE 4.5  Atlas

of the Group’s Images Showing the Reenacted Photographs

Source: © Fernando Portal. New images by Andrés Cortínez

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FIGURE 4.6 Composite of Google Images Search Results Associated With Key Dates

of Exhibitions Held Between 2013 and 2019

In this way, the new photographs manage to be inscribed in continuity with the original ones, reproducing not only the object itself, but also the gaze technically mediated by photography on the same object. Although this continuity inscribes both sets of images within the same register, the new photographs also give an account—through its digital nature—of the contemporaneity of their capture and of their subject, distancing themselves from the materiality of original analogue photographs. One field where it has been possible to perceive the impact of the circulation of the new images and their dialogue with the original images has been through Google Images search tool. Since the first digital communication of the project based on its photographs, a systematic monitoring of its appearances has been carried out, a record that enables one to observe how the narratives of both ­original and new images have intertwined, complementing, and even confusing each other.

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Exhibition and Property

For its part, the circulation and exhibition of the objects has accompanied the development of the project in its different stages. The conceptualization stage of the project was accompanied by the exhibition of the research’s documentation, and after the realization of the objects, they have been part of multiple exhibitions in Chile and abroad.40 Among these, its inclusion in the “Bauhaus: influence on Chilean design” exhibition, organized by the Department of Design of the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, in conjunction with the La Moneda Cultural Center, located below the historic Government Palace plaza. In this institutional and architectural context—where the coup produced the air strikes on La Moneda, these reconstructions were convened by the curators to integrate a selection of objects designed and produced in Chile, capable of accounting for the local development of the trajectories triggered by the Bauhaus, a century after its foundation. In this exhibition, the local and disciplinary narrative in

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FIGURE 4.7 Objects

Exhibited at Bauhaus: Influencia en el diseño Chileno Exhibition at Centro Cultural La Moneda, 2019

Source and ©: Centro Cultural La Moneda

which the life of these designs was materially integrated into the historiography of national modern design, and into the popular imagination. In addition to the surprise and interest caused by the appearance of these objects in the public sphere through these exhibitions, questions about their ownership also manifested themselves as an urgent theme to address. Torn from their immaterial lethargy and converted into physical objects, the material manifestation of their ideas and genealogies, acquired, among other outcomes, that of quickly and unthinkingly becoming merchandise. This consumption-based attraction introduced a contradiction in the project as well as an opportunity to add a new exchange in the sequence of transfers between public and private property within the framework of the history that has arisen here. In this context and placing as a global objective not only the recreation of these national products but also the creation of common property over them, conversations were held with public cultural institutions in Chile, to find in them a recipient for the donation of the generated objects. Finally, after a series of conversations, in January 2019, the objects were donated to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos), a publicly funded institution and a space whose collections are intended to give visibility to the human rights violations committed by the State of Chile between 1973 and 1990; to dignify the victims and their families; and to stimulate reflection and debate on the importance of respect and tolerance, so that these events are never repeated.41

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This institutional platform will house and preserve these objects by integrating them into different curatorial narratives, and providing the newly found materiality of these ideas, a place in the national heritage of the intangible and tangible products of the short-lived socialist experiment in Chile. Acknowledgements

This research was supported by United Kingdom’s Design History Society through a Research Access Grant. Notes 1 V. Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “Estatismo y neoliberalismo: un contrapunto militar. Chile, 1973–1979,” Historia, numero 34 (2001). 2 Hugo Palmarola, “Chile. Diseño Industrial,” in Historia del Diseño en América Latina y el Caribe. Industrialización y comunicación visual para la autonomía, edited by Silvia Fernández y Gui Bonsiepe, 1st ed., 138–59 (Sao Paulo: Blücher, 2008). 3 André Gunder Frank, “Economic Genocide in Chile: Open Letter to Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger,” Economic and Political Weekly, 12 June 1976. 4 Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero, “When Design Goes South: From Decoloniality, through Declassification to DESSOBONS,” in Design in Crisis. New Worlds, Philosophies and Practices, eds. Tony Fry and Adam Nocek, 56–73 (London: Routledge, 2021). 5 Tony Fry, “A  Geography of Power: Design History and Marginality,” in The Idea of Design. A Design Issues Reader, eds. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, 204–2018. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 6 República de Chile, “Aprueba la reforma de los Estatutos de la Sociedad Anónima denominada ‘RCA S.A. Electrónica’,” Diario Oficial de La República de Chile (March 10, 1971): 8. 7 Duplicassette, “ARCI,” Duplicassette.cl (2008), https://web.archive.org/ web/20110907235311/www.duplicassette.cl/arci.html. 8 CORFO, “CORFO en el gobierno de la Unidad Popular. 4 de Noviembre 1970, 4 de Noviembre 1971,” Santiago de Chile (1971): 4. 9 Eden Medina, The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile, 1964–1973,” (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 187. 10 Alfredo Sepúlveda, La Unidad Popular. Los mil días de Salvador Allende y la vía chilena al socialismo (Santiago de Chile: Sudamericana, 2020), 56. 11 CORFO, “CORFO en el gobierno de la Unidad Popular. 4 de Noviembre 1970, 4 de Noviembre 1971,” Santiago de Chile (1971): 14. 12 Ibid. 13 Cámara de Diputados de Chile, “Informe de la comisión investigadora encargada de analizar presuntas irregularidades en las privatizaciones de empresas del estado ocurridas con anterioridad al año 1990,” (2004): 34. 14 (Allende, 1971:123). 15 Eden Medina, The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile, 1964–1973 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 185. 16 Sergio Bitar and Eduardo Moyano, “Redistribución del consumo y transición al socialismo,” Cuadernos de La Realidad Nacional, CEREN, no. 11 (1972): 26. 17 Franck Gaudichaud, Poder popular y cordones industriales (Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 2004), 122. 18 Karen Donoso, Cultura y dictadura. Censuras, proyectos e institucionalidad cultural en Chile, 1973–1989 (Santiago de Chile: uah/Ediciones, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2019), 14.

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19 Williamson, Luz María, Memoria y amnesia. Sobre la historia reciente del arte en Chile. 1976–2006 (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2017), 54). 20 Valerio Fuenzalida, La industria fonográfica chilena (Santiago de Chile: CENECA, 1985), 7. 21 Vania Paillacán Cifuentes, “Ingenio criollo: la televisión y su implementación, producción y consumo en Chile. (1964–1982),” Universidad Alberto Hurtado (2019): 32. 22 Cámara de Diputados de Chile, “Informe de la comisión investigadora encargada de analizar presuntas irregularidades en las privatizaciones de empresas del estado ocurridas con anterioridad al año 1990,” (2004): 34. 23 Andrés Aguirre-Briones, “Cambios institucionales y transformaciones en la propiedad y el control empresarial. El caso de los grupos económicos chilenos.1970–1978,” Historia, no. 396 (2019): 3.34. 24 Karen Donoso, Cultura y dictadura. Censuras, proyectos e institucionalidad cultural en Chile, 1973–1989 (Santiago de Chile: uah/Ediciones, Universidad Alberto ­Hurtado, 2019), 43–50. 25 Vania Paillacán Cifuentes, “Ingenio criollo: la televisión y su implementación, producción y consumo en Chile. (1964–1982),” Universidad Alberto Hurtado (2019): 32. 26 Duplicassette, “ARCI,” Duplicassette.cl (2008), https://web.archive.org/ web/20110907235311/www.duplicassette.cl/arci.html. 27 Tomás Maldonado, “Design Education,” in Education of Vision, ed. Gyorgy Kepes, 1st ed. (New York: Braziller, George, 1965), 132. 28 Fernando Portal, “Diseño y desarrollo en las periferias del capitalismo. Transferencias metodológicas entre HfG Ulm y el grupo de diseño del INTEC,” RChD: Creación y Pensamiento, no. 1 (2016): 37–52. 29 Fernando Portal, “Objetos esquivos,” in Anales de Arquitectura 2017–2018, Escuela de Arquitectura PUC, 1st ed. (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones ARQ, 2018), 196–205. 30 Natalia Alvarado, “Institucionalización del diseño en Chile. Entrevistas a Rodrigo Walker y Pepa Foncea,” in Editar para transformar. Publicaciones de arquitectura y diseño en Chile durante los años 60s y 70s, En el marco de la exposición Clip/Stamp/ Fold, eds. Fernando Portal and Pablo Brugnoli, 1st ed. (Santiago de Chile: Capital Books, 2015), 100–11. 31 Abraham Moles, “Functionalism in Crisis,” Ulm, no. 19/20 (1968): 24–25. 32 Kenneth Frampton, “Apropos Ulm: Curriculum and Critical Theory,” Oppositions, no. 3 (January 1974), 17–36. 33 Tomás Maldonado, “Design Education,” in Education of Vision, ed. Gyorgy Kepes, 1st ed., (New York: Braziller, George, 1965), 132. 34 Jezko Fezer and Matthias Görlich, “Design in Transition to Socialism. A  TechnoPolitical Field Report Form Unidad Popular’s Chile (1971–1973),” in Gui Bonsiepe. Design and Democracy. Civic City Cahier 2, eds. Jezko Fezer and Matthias Görlich (London: Bedford Press, 2010), 68. 35 These correspond to a set of economic crockery produced for the Fanalosa company, and to a plastic spoon for measuring powdered milk for the government’s “Milk Plan” infant nutrition plan. 36 Grupo de Diseño, “Proyectos de Diseño Industrial,” INTEC, Revista del Comité de Investigaciones Tecnológicas 1 (1971): 51–75. 37 Gui Bonsiepe, “Inexpensive Record Player, Chile, 1972,” in The Disobedience of Design. Gui Bosiepe, ed. Lara Penin (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 451. 38 José Hernández, “Procesos de fabricación,” in Bienes Públicos. Recreación de un archivo de diseño y política en Chile. 1970–1973, ed. Fernando Portal (Santiago de Chile: Self-published, 2018), 142–55. 39 These models contained printed circuit boards marked NAC 60959 and NAC 60961 from electronic component manufacturer North American Components, a subsidiary of Arrow Electronics, founded in 1935, and a supplier of components to RCA since the 1940s. (Arrow, N/A)

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40 The recreated objects and their documentation had been exhibited as part of the following exhibitions: Autonomía (Autonomy), 11th Media Arts Biennial. National Fine Arts Museum, Santiago de Chile 2013; Temblor (Earthquake), 13th Media Arts Biennial. National Fine Arts Museum, Santiago de Chile 2017, Bienes Públicos (Common Goods), Galeria NAC, Santiago de Chile, 2018; Territorios corporales (Corporeal Territories), Centro Cultural Matta, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019; Bauhaus Chile 100, van de Velde Building, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany; Bauhaus: Influencia en el diseño Chileno (Bauhaus: influence on Chilean design), Centro Cultural La Moneda, 2019 and Exposición principal—Pieza del mes (Main Exhibition—Piece of the Month), Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, 2021. 41 Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, “Sobre el Museo,” n.d, https://web. museodelamemoria.cl/sobre-el-museo/.

Bibliography Aguirre-Briones, Andrés. “Cambios institucionales y transformaciones en la propiedad y el control empresarial. El caso de los grupos económicos chilenos, 1970–1978.” Historia, no. 396 (2019): 3.34. Allende, Salvador. Primer mensaje del Presidente Allende ante el Congreso Pleno. Santiago de Chile: Talleres Gráficos, 2019. Alvarado, Natalia. “Institucionalización del diseño en Chile. Entrevistas a Rodrigo Walker y Pepa Foncea.” In Editar para transformar. Publicaciones de arquitectura y diseño en Chile durante los años 60s y 70s, En el marco de la exposición Clip/Stamp/ Fold, edited by Fernando Portal and Pablo Brugnoli, 1st ed, 100–11. Santiago de Chile: Capital Books, 2015. Arrow Electronics. n.d. “History.” Bitar, Sergio, and Eduardo Moyano. “Redistribución del consumo y transición al socialismo.” Cuadernos de La Realidad Nacional, CEREN, no. 11 (1972): 26. Bonsiepe, Gui. “Design Im Übergang Zum Sozialismus, 1974 (Excerpt).” In Gui Bonsiepe. Design and Democracy. Civic City Cahier 2, edited by Jezko Fezer and Matthias Görlich, 68. London: Bedford Press, 2010. Bonsiepe, Gui. “Inexpensive Record Player, Chile, 1972.” In The Disobedience of Design. Gui Bosiepe, edited by Lara Penin. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Cámara de Diputados de Chile. “Informe de la comisión investigadora encargada de analizar presuntas irregularidades en las privatizaciones de empresas del estado ocurridas con anterioridad al año 1990” (2004). CORFO. “CORFO en el gobierno de la Unidad Popular. 4 de Noviembre 1970, November 4, 1971.” Donoso, Karen. “Discursos y políticas culturales de la dictadura cívico-militar chilena, 1973–1988.” Dossier Historia Política—Chile Contemporáneo Numero 25 (2012): 1–34. Donoso, Karen. Cultura y dictadura. Censuras, proyectos e institucionalidad cultural en Chile, 1973–1989. Santiago de Chile: uah/Ediciones, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2019. Duplicassette. “ARCI.” Duplicassette.cl. (2008). https://web.archive.org/web/20110907235311/ www.duplicassette.cl/arci.html. Fezer, Jezko, and Matthias Görlich. “Design in Transition to Socialism. A  TechnoPolitical Field Report Form Unidad Popular’s Chile (1971–1973).” In Gui Bonsiepe. Design and Democracy. Civic City Cahier 2, edited by Jezko Fezer and Matthias Görlich. London: Bedford Press, 2010. Frampton, Kenneth. “Apropos Ulm : Curriculum and Critical Theory.” Oppositions, no. 3 (January 1974): 17–36.

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Fuenzalida, Valerio. La industria fonográfica chilena. Santiago de Chile: CENECA, 1985. Fry, Tony. “A  Geography of Power: Design History and Marginality.” In The Idea of Design. A Design Issues Reader, edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, 204–2018. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Gaudichaud, Franck. Poder popular y cordones industriales. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 2004. Grupo de Diseño. “Proyectos de Diseño Industrial.” INTEC, Revista del Comité de Investigaciones Tecnológicas 1 (1971): 51–75. Grupo de proyecto Diseño Industrial. Informe Final. Diseño de un tocadiscos portátil. Santiago de Chile: Group de proyecto Diseño Industrial, 1971. Gunder Frank, André. “Economic Genocide in Chile: Open Letter to Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger.” Economic and Political Weekly, June 12, 1976. Gutiérrez Borrero, Alfredo. “When Design Goes South: From Decoloniality, through Declassification to DESSOBONS.” In Design in Crisis. New Worlds, Philosophies and Practices, edited by Tony Fry and Adam Nocek, 56–73. London: Routledge, 2021. Hernández, José. “Procesos de fabricación.” In Bienes Públicos. Recreación de un archivo de diseño y política en Chile. 1970–1973, edited by Fernando Portal. Santiago de Chile: Self-published, 2018. Maldonado, Tomás. “Design Education.” In Education of Vision, edited by Gyorgy Kepes. New York: Braziller, George, 1965. Medina, Eden. The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile, 1964– 1973. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Moles, Abraham. “Functionalism in Crisis.” Ulm, no. 19/20 (1968): 24–25. Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. “Sobre el Museo.” n.d. https://web. museodelamemoria.cl/sobre-el-museo/. Paillacán Cifuentes, Vania. “Ingenio criollo: la televisión y su implementación, producción y consumo en Chile. (1964–1982).” Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2019. Palmarola, Hugo. “Chile. Diseño Industrial.” In Historia del Diseño en América Latina y el Caribe. Industrialización y comunicación visual para la autonomía., edited by Silvia Fernández y Gui Bonsiepe, 1st ed., 138–59. Sao Paulo: Blücher, 2008. Portal, Fernando. “Diseño y desarrollo en las periferias del capitalismo. Transferencias metodológicas entre HfG Ulm y el grupo de diseño del INTEC.” RChD: Creación y Pensamiento, no. 1 (2016): 37–52. Portal, Fernando. “Objetos esquivos.” In Anales de Arquitectura 2017–2018. Escuela de Arquitectura PUC, 196–205. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones ARQ, 2018. República de Chile. “Aprueba la reforma de los Estatutos de la Sociedad Anónima denominada ‘RCA S.A. Electrónica’.” Diario Oficial de La República de Chile, March 10, 1971. Sepúlveda, Alfredo. La Unidad Popular. Los mil días de Salvador Allende y la vía chilena al socialismo. Santiago de Chile: Sudamericana, 2020. Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, V. “Estatismo y neoliberalismo: un contrapunto militar. Chile, 1973–1979.” Historia 34 (2001). Williamson, Luz María. Memoria y amnesia. Sobre la historia reciente del arte en Chile, 1976–2006. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2017.

5 IN LAND WE TRUST Nandini Bagchee

The Land June 2020

It was a day before the City of New York voted on the budget and a full-on Black led encampment had grown outside City Hall in downtown Manhattan to “Defund the Police.” There were tons of police everywhere and I noticed for the first time the three sculpted figures atop a pedestal on the façade of the municipal archives building across the street—a tall allegorical figure flanked by a Dutch settler to her left and an indigenous person to the right. The night before, the activists encamped in the park had evaded the police to embellish this sculpture. The Dutchman had been painted black and scrawled on the pedestal of the statuary were the words, Lenape Lands, alongside the other slogans targeting cops as pigs and calling out for racial justice. The jumble of words on the pedestal haphazardly but succinctly linked the policing of Black bodies to the unjust cooption of indigenous territories. The foundational myths of the city and the country, built upon stolen lands with the labor of enslaved people, were all summarily connected with the broad strokes of paint from a spray can. Within a month this writing was scrubbed clean, and the city council voted to maintain the police budget and the encampment gradually dissipated. The food stations, the banners, the posters, and the homeless population rubbing shoulders with seasoned activists left the concrete sidewalk to the regulars—the city hall workers and the tourists on their way to the Brooklyn Bridge. The shared space of collective action—a makeshift sidewalk commons went back to being a pedestrian throughfare. In a city where “public” property is clearly demarcated, DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-7

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FIGURE 5.1 Lenape Lands, Municipal Archives Building, June 2020. Photograph by

Nandini Bagchee

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the commons, such as they are, must be vigilantly captured with such acts of temporal participation. The commons are not the same as public space. The enclosure acts in 17th century England ended traditional rights where “commoners” could use the pastures for grazing in an open field system. Exclusive rights of property owners over enclosed fields, pastures, and forests forced small farmers out of a medieval economy of farming, foraging, cattle grazing, and gathering wood towards new modes of labor and production. At precisely the same time, European colonizers seeking to make their fortunes in the colonies brought this model of enclosure and property ownership to the so-called new worlds. The Europeans saw America and its lands as a ‘wilderness’ that needed to be civilized and controlled. They began a process of converting it into a productive colony by eliminating forests, creating plantations, and systematically exterminating both human and non-human populations.1 The rapid expansion of the European settlers on land that was acquired by dubious treaties and outright aggression remains vigorously in dispute. The tiny little spots of indigenous reservations on the vast map of the United States represent yet another act of ruthless enclosure, one that ended a mode of living founded upon the understanding that species and ecologies were co-dependent. Land and all the commonwealth that comes with it was seen as proprietary rather than a resource to be shared,

FIGURE 5.2 Robert

Swann and Charles Sherrod With Members of New Communities, Inc. at Planning Meeting Circa 1970. Image Courtesy Schumacher Center. https://centerforneweconomics.org/apply/community-land-trustprogram/

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maintained, and carefully used. This understanding of land emerging from a settler colonial perspective of maximum benefit for an invading minority created a nation where exclusive ownership of land and, by extension the privileges that came with it, are enshrined in the constitution of the United States. A revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. . . . It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. Malcom X 2 The only way African Americans in the Deep South would ever have the independence and security to stand up for their rights—and not be punished for doing so—was to own the land themselves. Charles Sherrod, President of New Communities, Inc CLT 3 The story of land, ownership, and sovereignty has several counter-imaginaries in the United States. A colony ruthlessly consolidated by European settlers using the uncompensated labor of enslaved people—the question of land and its ownership features predominantly in debates of equity and justice. For the Black farmers in the south the undelivered promise of “40 acres and a mule” had loomed since 1890.4 As the voices of these two leaders (Malcolm X and Charles Sherrod) coming from two different strands of the Black sovereignty movement suggests, they do not see a future for their race without access to land. For Malcom X, a revolutionary separatist—the land would allow for the creation of an independent nation. For Charles Sherrod, emerging from the creative pacifism of the civil rights movement, the land was a place to build a trust that could sustain a community under siege. The community land trust (CLT) model emerged in the United States from a radical as well as a practical tradition of a battle against racialized capitalism tied to individual property ownership. New Communities Inc., the first community land trust in the United States, was initiated by Slater King—the owner of a successful Black-owned real estate company in southwest Georgia—with support from Bob Swann—an international pacifist, house designer, and land reformer. Slater and Swann met and were arrested in 1965 in Georgia on a peace march that was headed from Quebec to Guantánamo. Along with other civil rights activists in Albany that included Charles and Shirley Sherrod, they organized the community land trust on 6,000 acres of land in Albany, Georgia.5 In 1968, this was the largest single property holding by African Americans that provided the Black sharecroppers a base to collectively own property and pursue a livelihood in a hostile environment. The organization attracted several families to farm and live off the land. It also created a model of collective ownership that focused back on use and community thereby challenging the regimes of racialized capitalism and

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disrupting the status quo. While the goals of the New Communities Inc. were seemingly pragmatic—they were in fact carrying out a long-delayed project of self-determination in the rural south. This rural model found new purpose in cities like New York in the 1970s and 1980s as working-class people struggled to maintain a foothold in urban areas in the wake of disinvestment followed by real estate speculation. Grass roots organizers, artists, and tenants living in a precarious urban environment with minimum support from the municipal government experimented with new modes of space-based activism and cooperative urbanism.6 The community land trust in the city with its model of community land ownership created a unique opportunity to counter land speculation. The Cooper Square Community Land Trust—the first and most robust of all the CLT’s in New York City—took several years of activism, planning, design, and legal strategy to be realized. In the 1960s the community battled a large scale “slum clearance project” and made their own proposal to prevent the displacement of the mainly low-income tenants that lived in this neighborhood. The project is a fascinating case study of the struggle to maintain affordable housing for low-income residents through the many twists and turns in the real estate saga of the Lower East Side. Through the 1980s, the land trust was forged in the streets and community spaces of New York where residents took to the street with banners that read “This Land is

FIGURE 5.3  Cooper

Square is Here to Stay, Banner on East 4th Street. Image Courtesy of Cooper Square Committee

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Ours” or “Speculators Keep Away.” These meaningful acts of public participation were part of a larger movement to stop the city from demolishing existing buildings and downgrading its properties at public auctions. But what really made this group of apartment buildings into a sustainable model for affordable housing was the creation of a legal strategy by which the buildings, to this day, remain impervious to the escalating prices of housing in downtown Manhattan. The Cooper Square Community Land Trust is at present comprised of 23 tenement buildings from the city of New York in the 1990s. This was the first of its kind multi-building community land trust in the city of New York, and this model remains one of the touchstones for other CLT’s in cities across the country. There are many ways to structure the CLT but the main idea is to create a series of checks and balances through a set of by-laws and a governance of the land by a board comprised of residents of the CLT, as well as some outside advocates and/ or people with specific property expertise. The board makes the decisions pertaining to the land and is responsible for holding the ground lease as an incorporated nonprofit entity. The buildings, and within those buildings, the apartments, that sit on the land are owned privately. This two-part ownership model effectively decouples the land from the structures that might be built upon it—such as housing, commercial, or cultural establishments.7 This dual structure creates checks and balances on future sale and protects the property from the speculative interests of the real estate market. This structure of two-part ownership validates the use-value of the property that can be collectively owned by the members of the community as well as transferred to future generations. The incentive to sell, move, or leverage this real estate as a commodity is greatly diminished. Land = Equity September 2021

On a site visit to Edgemere (Queens) I met two women organizing and running a successful community garden along the Bay. They had a lot of action in their garden that summer and proudly showed me the raised beds, the storage shed, and the remaining bounty of vegetables—red chilies, green peppers, eggplants, and herbs. It was a beautiful day and we sat in the shade of their gazebo looking across at the vacant lots enclosed by the ubiquitous city-installed chain link fence. There were many such vacant lots in Edgemere which had been hard hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. We got talking about these lots and they dreamed of orchards, skating rinks, and other amenities that would transform this weatherbeaten peninsula to a haven of recreation and healing for their community. The conversation turned to the Request for Expression of Interest (RFEI) that the city had put out for the development of the 119 lots into public open space and lowdensity housing. These women, who seemed to have a deep commitment to this place and to the overall concept of developing the land, did not think the community land trust was the right vehicle for their community to get control of the

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land. As Black homeowners themselves, they felt that their community deserved the full package of equity that comes with home ownership. Having the land tied to a CLT was not, for them, advantageous enough. This was a clear example of the elephant in the room. Despite the obvious advantages of the CLT as a way of organizing for permanent affordability, removing the value of the land from the value of the building is still a challenging concept. Private property ownership is an institution with deep roots—particularly among Black, brown, and immigrant communities, where home ownership is synonymous with financial stability. In New York City where the period of “boom” far outlasts that of “bust,” the value of property constantly escalates providing a cushion to work and live with some guarantee of financial security. A community land trust on the other hand, provides a fundamental structure of use and social value. But, what does this Marxist speak mean to people trying to survive below minimum wage in a capitalist economy? How possible is it to live a modest life on de-commodified land, while a city driven by finance and real estate speculation reaches its tentacles to the furthest of the five boroughs? There are many unresolved contradictions that undergird this land-based substructure for equity within the superstructure of capitalism. These contradictions inevitably push us to ask who a CLT model works for and how, with an immediate reply claiming that these projects are not a one-size-fits-all solution. The project of de-commodified housing has had many iterations in New York City. The community land trust is one of many such models that has found currency in the public imagination. There are at this telling, close to 20 different community land trusts across the five boroughs of New York City. Most of them do not have land at present but are making bids to acquire city-owned land and the city bureaucrats seem to be paying (some) attention to what still appears to be a small grassroots movement. Why is the CLT important still? And why now? One factor is that the long-cherished goal of individual home ownership for a majority of low- and moderate-income residents does not exist, particularly in a city like New York, today. Coming out of the pandemic and feeling the isolation there seems to be a vigorous push to examine other forms of cooperative ownership. The precarity of jobs, food scarcity, and the premium on commercial space has additionally put pressure on what used to be more affordable life options in the peripheral boroughs of the city. As real estate speculation moves north and east of Manhattan, people are beginning once again to rethink their relationship to real estate and its equation to equity. The We

This “we”—the community—is the most fluid element in the community land trust. Often compared to an idealized family unit trying to expand out of the intimacy of home into something expansive, community in this case is bounded by land, locality, a project, and a concept of the future. This type of community is a work in progress and different people enter the process as and when they can.

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FIGURE 5.4  Representation

of Four Community Land Trusts in New York City. The Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards, Western Queens Community Land Trust, East New York Community Land Trust, and ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust (2016–2023). Image by Bagchee Architects

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The word ‘community’ is often used to invoke a feeling of natural connection between certain people. But, as my colleague, the anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao points out “there is nothing natural about community.” Communities, like most human relationships, are carefully constructed bonds. Perhaps the word that has gained currency lately—collective, might be more appropriate to describe a praxis-based aspirational community. But in the United States, community remains important to the project of self-determination.8 The concept of community within the CLT seeks the project of urban change by fusing the identity of the constituents in search of transformation. It is in this sense liberatory and nimble not static or pre-formed. This assertion has become, one could argue, a benefit and a curse for the creation of CLTs, which are at the end, primarily social and human. Collaborating as an architect with (five) different community land trusts, in various stages of formation, I have in my practice embraced the term ‘community,’ primarily as a way of connecting to the broader histories of space-based action. Within the CLTs, although the legal framework of formation is similar to the one described for the Cooper Square CLT—each of their communal structures is different. Some CLT’s are an extension of familial networks that have several different points of social convergence in the daily lives of individual members. Others are forged in moments of insurrectionary opposition to a development or re-zoning that generates an immediate threat of displacement. Yet others are a coalition—a careful pooling together of different expertise that lend strength to the social movement. These structures reveal the relevance of the model as a framework capable of connecting people to a given territory to create a social cohesion that allows and facilitates their existence in a system of profit driven development of land. That these examples emerge in the context of New York City is yet another sign of the inefficacy of the voracious real estate market that dominates life here and elsewhere. July 2016

I met Mychal Johnson, a community activist with an expertise in real estate and construction, at a waterfront summer festival organized by South Bronx Unite.9 A small section of the Port Morris waterfront had been transformed by a group of waterfront enthusiasts into a place of celebration. The food, the music, the canoes, and the laughter on the small sliver of concrete waterfront was my first encounter with a community born out of a bitter struggle against the grocery delivery service Fresh Direct and the city of New York. The mood was festive, but the frustration of those assembled was palpable as they spoke movingly about the high asthma rates and the lack of access to health and recreation in a primarily Black and Latino neighborhood. The disposition of 94 acres of

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city-owned land on this same waterfront to the corporation Fresh Direct was the last straw for a community experiencing decades of environmentally polluting waste transfer stations and heavy trucking-based industry.10 A coalition of the South Bronx community protested and then sued the city for exacerbating the existing hazardous air quality conditions in the South Bronx. They lost that battle, but they came out with the understanding that they needed to act fast and move from opposing a city sanctioned project on public land to proposing one of their own. They fixed their sights on the Lincoln Recovery Center, an abandoned neighborhood health clinic at the center of a block on 140th Street in the Mott Haven neighborhood. They sought to reuse and adapt this building into a facility that would respond to the pressing need for community space in the neighborhood. The three-story, 23,000-sq.ft. building was one of many municipal neighborhood clinics constructed in the 1930s with federal funding. The building had been a vital institution that provided health care to the Mott Haven residents from the time it opened its doors in 1934 until its closure in 2011. This building connected the present work of South Bronx Unite with that of the Young Lords who took charge of the building in the 1970s and introduced acupuncture and Reiki as alternative treatments to cure drug addiction.11 Mychal Johnson, who lives two doors down from this building, reminisces the time when he would stop by for an acupuncture treatment. To walk out of his house and see the building empty and derelict causes Mychal great pain. The building has a deep meaning for those who saw the South Bronx destroyed and demolished in the 1980s. Foregrounding the history of the Young Lords and reclaiming this building has therefore become an act of communal healing for many who live in the neighborhood. In the Fall of 2016, with the blessing of South Bronx Unite, I ran an advanced design studio at the Spitzer School of Architecture in City College York to engage with this site.12 The academic set-up allowed us to plunge into the urban history of the Bronx, the legacy of activism, and the understanding of a place haunted by broken promises. Over the course of that semester, the yellow brick building was shaped and re-shaped with concepts of community that entered and engaged with the brick walls to generate content and meaning. We spent many hours talking and listening to organizers, residents, and, of course, to each other. There were afternoon sessions that stretched late into the evening as people scratched their heads on picnic tables at Brook Park—trying to imagine occupying a building that had been locked up for years. For my students, the young architects-in-training, this exercise brought them closer to some of the dilemmas one faces when the “architectural or project brief” is not neatly pre-arranged. They interviewed residents and designed activities that allowed for an exchange of ideas in a series of informal gatherings. The community leaders stepped in to

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FIGURE 5.5 Health

Education and Arts (H.E.ARTS) Building as Envisioned by the Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards. Image by Bagchee Architects

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provide grounded knowledge and through the course of these exchanges, we felt and developed a sense of mutual solidarity. This dialog with the residents clearly evidenced the need of deep engagement that is not common in the halls of architecture schools. The resulting student proposals were thoughtful but perhaps a little hesitant in their scope. The real work accomplished by the studio was to structure a dialog and to use design as an apparatus to build community. It was through this critical work that South Bronx Unite identified the program for a cultural center that brought together the need for Health(H) Education(E) and the Arts(A). They named the building H.E.ARTS. Through the course of the next year, I continued to work professionally with South Bronx Unite to produce a report that brought the H.E.ARTS project into alignment with zoning, code, building structure, and financial analysis.13 As the project transitioned from wish to concrete proposition, I  took on the role of design-architect and South Bronx Unite incorporated more formally into the Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards (MHPMCLS). In addition to advocating for H.E.ARTS, their work has expanded to take on the many challenges that their neighborhood has faced through the pandemic. They maintain a careful balance between their activist stance—such as demonstrating against jails—and their bureaucratic negotiations with the city—requesting support from elected officials and municipal agencies. In their bid to acquire public land and funding to renovate and maintain the property, the MHPMCLS have found common ground that crosses some of the barriers of race, religion, language, and politics within the neighborhood. The complex narrative of conceptualizing the site and its layered histories have provided the community land trust with a strong foundation to continue the work of building community.

The Trust

The trust in the legal sense is an arrangement protecting property or other types of assets from various types of predatory takeovers. In thinking once more about the commons—in the face of growing concerns about resource scarcity—the formation of a trust that is collectively agreed upon is an urgent need. In an interview, Memo Salazar, a filmmaker and member of the Western Queens Community Land Trust (WQCLT), puts it this way: “We’re just the people that hold the piece of paper that keeps you honest and makes sure that people 50 years from now are still being just as honest, and are still being stewards of the land to the community.”14 Memo Salazar and Jenny Dubnau, the founding directors of the WQCLT, are sometimes skeptical about a movement for equity premised on the ownership of land. They understand the paradox and the compromise of being tied to current concepts of land ownership. A community land trust tries to work with what exists while creating legal constraints on the pitfalls of proprietary ownership.

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February 14, 2019

After months of planning and negotiations with the city of New York, Amazon, the corporation, decided to pull out of its bid to build its second headquarters in Western Queens. In an unusual but unanimous show of opposition, “lawmakers, progressive activists and union leaders” decided that Amazon did not deserve the $3 million in subsidies to take over a good chunk of industrially zoned land in Long Island City.15 The Western Queens Community Land Trust (WQCLT) came together in the glow of this victory against big business. Much like their fellow CLT across the river they realized that this was a moment worth leveraging and they too moved from protest to proposition. They looked closely at the lots that had been identified by Amazon as part of their 28-acre corporate campus and homed in on a large city-owned building on Vernon Boulevard and 44th Street Drive along the East River. The 600,000-sq.ft. concrete frame building was built as a storage facility for the city’s Department of Purchase back in the 1930s and it is currently under the jurisdiction of the Department of Education (DOE). The building is six stories tall and serviced with 15 loading docks, six staircases, and four freight elevators. It is partly occupied by the DOE and used as office space, storage, and a hub for the distribution of dry food for public schools across the city. The central location of this building just across the river from midtown Manhattan makes this a very attractive site for all types of development. This part of Long Island City is currently zoned for light manufacturing that over the years has attracted small-scale urban makers, commercial businesses along with working artists, actors, and musicians. Since the early 2000s the re-zoning to the east and south of this site has enabled new, “high-end” development in the neighborhood. In Long Island City, the conversion of industrial buildings into apartments, offices, and hotel rooms has drastically raised land prices and rents, resulting in the displacement of longtime businesses, artists, and residents from the area’s industrial core. Residents of the nation’s largest public housing development, Queensbridge Houses, to the north of this site, are increasingly divided from their neighbors to the south. The changing landscape of high-end development offers them little by way of employment opportunities, and it threatens to marginalize the small businesses and the social resources they rely upon. Spaces dedicated to providing for these missing opportunities are, not surprisingly, needed to preserve Long Island City’s (income) diversity which is being erased by the shiny new apartment buildings that attract a higher income clientele for the most part. In September 2020, a group of people from the land trust were able to visit the DOE building and saw to their dismay the underutilized spaces with big beautiful multipaned glass windows. At the height of the pandemic, they began to organize and put out a call for partners in need of work-space. Their project

FIGURE 5.6 Queensboro

Peoples Space (QPS) Building as Envisioned by the Western Queens Community Land Trust. Image by Bagchee Architects

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to populate the DOE building is focused on providing commercial space and creating job opportunities for people in the neighborhood. The core members of the community land trust facilitated these sessions which were thematically organized around manufacturing, arts, food, and care. They invited me as their architect to these remote sessions and through this early engagement with the project I helped spatialize the vision for the future Queensboro Peoples Space (QPS) over the course of a year. The project had the twofold goal of getting mission aligned individuals and organizations committed to sharing space in the new QPS building and the other was to create a document that would advocate for elected officials and municipal agencies to lend support and ultimately realize the vision for a community-owned, community-led 600,000-sq.ft. manufacturing building. The architectural project, therefore, strategically fluctuates between these two poles, alternating between activism and bureaucracy. One might ask, what is the appeal of the community land trust—a land tenure device, to create a structure of communal ownership—to activists, designers, and architects? Why is this legal structure of writing by-laws and contractual agreements between residents and organizers being explored by academics and practitioners of urban design as something exciting? The two projects that I  have briefly described here are both foundational undertakings for two community land trusts to build a community around the specific questions of what these buildings mean to their movement. Design and the deployment of an architectural method became a way to move two city-owned buildings from opaque, inaccessible public properties towards a commons shaped by direct participation. As architects, being at the front end of a community facilitated process allowed us (me, my studio collaborators, and students) to design a set of processes through words and modelling activities. The drawings and models we produced became a means to unpack the narrative of community and provided those on the ground a toolkit for further action and discussion. September 2022

Five years after completing the H.E.ARTS report, the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) released a Request for Proposals (RFP) inviting respondents to develop the site. The MHPMCLT had been waiting for this moment and had gathered a team that included us as the design architects and submitted a 300-page response to this call. After many years of advocacy, this work will be a big turning point in this project as the radical vision of the community begins to interface directly with the bureaucratic mission of city agents. In search of new modalities of practice that dismantle traditional clientdesigner relationships architects are seeking out new forums of engagement that they can contribute to. The community land trust creates an ambitious agenda for what is at its core a political project for disenfranchised populations towards

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self-determination. The resurgent Black and indigenous liberation movements of today ground some of these same demands where land is seen as a form of reparation. The community land trust provides, perhaps, an opportunity to explore the future of collective use and a process of participation where design can become an apparatus for a culture that moves from extractive ownership towards a process of generating an action plan for a collective-benefit, ­community-controlled form of land management. Architects and urban designers working in collaboration with lawyers, planners, and community activists are shaping new models for the decommodification of “public” land at the front end rather than as the rearguard commissioned to design a building once other aspects of the project are in place. The drawings reconfigured here for this chapter are a collage of some of the more professional visualizations of the two sites in the south Bronx and western Queens. It is critical, I believe, for a discipline that prides itself on future-thinking to shape this narrative early on. The task of design for us is to imagine community ownership and create a vision for the occupation of these sites while acknowledging the counter-institutional activism that binds this type of community and facilitates the true life of a vibrant city. Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the members of the Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards, Western Queens Community Land Trust, East New York Community Land Trust, and ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust for the years of struggle and collaboration (ongoing). A special thanks to Ngawang Tenzin (team-mate) whose talent and dedication have been critical to the realization of the work represented in this chapter. Notes 1 For a history of this genocide and land grab see, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015). 2 Words from “Message to the Grass Roots,” by Malcom X at a Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in Detroit, November 1963. 3 Quoted from ROOTS & BRANCHES A Gardener’s Guide to the Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust, accessed June  8, 2023, https://cltroots.org/theguide/early-hybrids-breeding-and-seeding-the-clt-model/georgia-seedbed. Quoted as well in Oksana Mironova, “How Community Land Trusts Can Help Address the Affordable Housing Crisisw,” Jacobin Magazine, accessed June 8, 2023, https://jac obin.com/2019/07/community-land-trusts-affordable-housing. 4 The well-known concept of “40 acres a mule” was a form of reparation to freed slaves issued in 1865 by the federal government to re-distribute 400,000 acres of confiscated confederate property. Several historians have discussed this scheme that was never executed. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014). 5 For a first-person account of the formation of New Communities Inc., see Robert Swann, Peace Civil Rights and the Search for Community: An

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Autobiography, 1998, accessed 2023, https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/ peace-civil-rights-and-the-search-for-community-an-autobiography/#Chapter%2020 6 The focus of this chapter is the community land trust; however, there are a lot of other ways in which communities banded together around housing, gardens, and land in the 1970s and 1980s. I discuss some of these ideas in my book Counter Institution (2018). Nandini Bagchee, Counter Institution: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 7 For the community land trust model as related to housing, see Oksana Mironova, “The Value of Land: How Community Land Trusts Maintain Housing ­Affordability,” Urban Omnibus, April 29, 2014, https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/04/the-value-of-landhow-community-land-trusts-maintain-housing-affordability/Also, Cassim  Shepard,  “Land Power,” Places Journal, July 2022, https://placesjournal.org/article/communityland-trusts-and-civic-empowerment/ 8 Conversation between the author and Anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao, May 26, 2023. 9 The South Bronx Unite is a community organization committed to “improve and protect the social, environmental, and economic future of Mott Haven and Port Morris” in the South Bronx, NYC. For more visit www.southbronxunite.org 10 Michael Powers, “In Bronx, Fresh Direct and Land of Great Promises,” The New York Times, February  20, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/nyregion/in-bronxfreshdirect-and-land-of-great-promises.html 11 For more about the work of the Young Lords, see Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 12 For a more detailed account of the studio methods and outcomes, see “Studio Report: Design and Advocacy in the South Bronx,” Urban Omnibus, May 3, 2017, https:// urbanomnibus.net/2017/05/hearts-studio/ 13 For a look at the work of Bagchee Architects on this project, see more at www.­ southbronxunite.org/hearts-health-education-the-arts-center 14 Memo  Salazar  and  Nandini  Bagchee,  “Trust  Exercise,”  UrbanOmnibus, December 02, 2021, https://urbanomnibus.net/2021/12/trust-exercise/ 15 This is taken from a New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/ nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html?module=inline

6 LA MESA, LA OLLA, LAS HOJAS A Conversation on the Revolts of Spatial-Doings Beyond-Against and Beyond Architectural Labor coopia

A Dialogue in Four Acts ACT 1—Llegar: Exhaustion and Fields of Alliances

Some-(time/where)s in Abya Yala: large table boiling olla de tamales maíz, tomate, cebolla, axiote, huitlacoche, hojas de plátano water, beer, mezcal, pulque, wine coopia

Raquel Gutiérrez Raúl Zibechi

Dear all, we are gathered today around la mesa y la olla to listen and discuss experiences and reflections around the revolts of spatial-doings beyond-against and beyond architectural labor. Others will join, but we feel it is important first to recognize ourselves, where/when/how/what we are? (Smoking) Sociologist and mathematician linked to the Benemérita Uni­versidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), and also involved in diverse social struggles. Currently I live in México. (Adjusts his cap) A few words, I am a popular educator, writer and activistthinker, dedicated to working with social movements or pueblos en movimiento in Latin America. Currently living in Uruguay.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-8

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Gloria Anzaldúa

Gustavo Esteva

Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo

Lucia Linsalata

John Holloway

Gloria

Cuadernos de Negación

My origin defined my work. From literature to the classrooms, I am compelled to think about Chicano identity, borders, mestizaje, dispossession, and sexuality. I was born in Southern Texas, a borderland territory between the United States and México. I was fired from IBM, now an aspiring guerrilla and once a government official. The State is useless for a total transformation, a revolution, so I decided to live and work with campesinos, indigenous peoples and marginalized urban groups. My last years were dedicated to autonomous social struggles in the territory known as México. I was a social fighter and a de-professionalized public intellectual. (Smiling) I have been thinking-feeling-doing through a relational autonomous framework. Together with Raquel and Lucia Linsalata we coordinate the permanent research seminar Entramados Comunitarios y Formas de lo Político at the BUAP. I am Italian but Latin American by adoption. Mother of two girls, professor, and a researcher. As Mina mentioned, we convene the permanent research seminar “communitarian interweavings and forms of the political.” I  have participated in many autonomous and self-managed spaces. (In a low voice) I have been in México since 1993, compelled to revolutionary hope, always full of questions around modes of moving beyond the monstrous, self-destructive capitalist system. I  am a professor that shares and studies alternatives to change the world, and for that we must be together. I make paths that can only be made by walking. And asking. (Puzzled) I’ve been thinking about the final form of this conversation . . . a transcription? a letter? a tweet? I  bring this to the conversation because it seems we “have not yet unlearned the esoteric bullshit and pseudo-intellectualizing that school brainwashed into [our] writing. How to begin again. How to approximate the intimacy and immediacy [we] want. What form?”1 We are still encouraged to write and to say, as long as it remains in the domain of opinion, as a representation of what we have lived. The intention of this [transcription], then, is not to make us recognizable in the face of this spectacular

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coopia Back to Gloria,



Raquel

world, but to make us recognizable to ourselves, as a negation of this spectacular world. This does not represent a quest in a self-referential sense, but that “ourselves” refers to that whole community of struggle that does not rest— and will not rest—until it leaves the old world completely destroyed.2   We are the working class that wants to abolish labor and class. Our political program is to destroy politics. To achieve that, we have to push the subversive tendencies that exist today to remake society everywhere. A long time ago that has long been known as “revolution.” Pressing questions and comments, dear companions! We would like to scream first that we are exhausted of sustaining the unsustainable! With-whom/how/where/when do we situate beyond-against and beyond the amalgam of patriarchy-capitalism and colonial domination? These are questions that cross/entangle/strain our everyday life. This disappropiative conversation will be more like a dérive, a multifarious dialogue by/with/through a multiplicity of references, voices, experiences, observations, intuitions, and mistakes.   Compelled to problematize the frame of the initial invitation, ‘making the public-­commons,’ beyond-against and beyond the notion of the public and the commons as they belong to a state-centric approach, we are urged to situate and senti-pensar, feel-think, with/through the autonomous project of the production of the common in common. Therefore we have invited all of you, and gathered all of us around this table, to prepare and eat some tamales, and con-movernos—to move, with/through your militant thought-action. Rather than promote revolts, we would like to move-with what we call provisionally the revolts of spatial-doings beyond-against and beyond architectural labor towards autonomous inhabitings. Let me begin with a call beyond the capacity to veto, that is the beyond-against. Inscribed within the fertile polemic sustained with John, the formulation beyond-against and beyond is involved in a larger debate concerning his ideas. The main point of disagreement is that if the starting point of reflection is the reproduction of life and not the various modes of production and accumulation of capital, then it is essential to comprehend life as a struggle, both in a negative and a self-affirming way. This is because there are diverse

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John

coopia

Raquel and Gustavo

efforts being made to ensure the sustainability of life in contexts of increasing aggression and capitalist destruction. Daily essential self-affirmation that can transcend what it contains and what it denies—negative moments—has mostly been a women’s issue. The first beyond, captures that exact moment. To shed light on the processes of politicization of such a collection of present-day struggles, the second beyond is added.3 The emphasis in negation follows Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, against the rejection of synthetic dialectics and its political-theoretical controversy. Together with Fernando Matamoros and Sergio Tischler we argue and ask: “Why dialectics at all, then?” and observe that dialectics is a result of the incorrect society we live in: “dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction.”4 Dialectics or negative thought is required since the world is erroneous. Non-identity, or the movement against identity and the established order, is Adorno’s key concept. “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder. . . . Contradiction . . . indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.” Non-identity is the underground movement of the refusal of identity, “contradiction is non-identity under the aspect of identity.”5 Dialectics is sensitivity to this refusal’s motion, “Dialectics is the persistent sensation of non-identity.”67 We are moving fast into the conversation. Maybe we could start with self-distributing tasks, some with la salsa, las hojas, la masa. . . . (While counting plantain leaves)   Rather than promote struggles, or even theories, this conversation is meant to con-movernos. How can we build autonomous potencies to self-determine the rhythms and forms of the spatial-doings that trans-form the territories we inhabit? Our starting points for this dissapropiative text are to problematize both the uni-versatility of architectural labor and its professional identity through doings. (To coopia) A brief note on conmover, con-mover in Spanish is, to movewith, like dancing with all our stomachs and hearts, and sintonize together. Con-movernos towards multiple doings and

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livings beyond-against and beyond the domination of abstract labor. Let’s move together! coopia Beautiful note! Continuing, through the trans-versal movement across negation and creation we refuse architectural labor and in a prefigurative manner, we say, fuck abstract labor! fuck architecture! fuck urbanism! fuck the metropolis! As both Raquel and John point out, more and more we are hearing NO! What Raquel calls “a polyphonic and broad display of the social capacity to veto against the hydra of the capitalist negation of life.”8 John emphasizes, “We want to break. We want to break the world as it is.”9 We are experiencing all through Abya Yala more and more this social capacity to veto to take the streets, both as struggles against violent neoliberal fascist and progressive governments.   This invitation to con-movernos grows from the violent metropolitan experience of inhabiting such monstrous spatialities, condemned to live to work and work to live. And grows from the non-effective state definition of us as a public. Consejo Nocturno We would like to remind that inhabiting “is becoming ungovernable, it is a force of  bonding and weaving of autonomous relationships.”10   We haven’t introduced Consejo Nocturno, it is not an author, collective, or organization. Its existence—in the orbit of the Imaginary Party or the Invisible Committee— is only “occasional”: its members are limited to meeting at moments of intervention. It situates in what some are still accustomed to call México. Jean Robert This becoming ungovernable emphasizes that the “art of inhabiting does not allow itself to be literate,”11 to “inhabit is con-vivir, live together.” These modes of living, of inhabiting are situated beyond-against and beyond modern heteronomous and mono-functional architectural space, as Ivan Illich points out “the Cartesian, three-dimensional, homogeneous space into which the architect builds, and the vernacular space which dwelling brings into existence, constitute different classes of space. Architects can do nothing but build. Vernacular dwellers generate the axioms of the spaces they inhabit.”12   Just arrived, I was a walking de-professionalized architect. In 1972, together with Sylvia Marcos we settled in

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Chamilpa, México, after being part of Provo in Holland. I  was fortunate to meet Ivan Illich and many other critical thinkers at the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), these dialogues were decisive for my thinking. (Serving drinks) Thank you, Consejo and Jean. Some questions . . .   What are the possibilities . . . or following Raquel, what are the horizons of autonomous spatialities? of inhabiting autonomously?   As Raquel also argues, “the recognition, care, and systematic production of the common are the conditions that render doing possible,”13 and we add living possible. We invite all to weave a dialogue that revisits certain discussions on abstract labor, revolts, spatialities, the commons, autonomy, and doings.

ACT 2—Envolver Y Cocer: Masks and Suspects or the Revolts Against Labor

(While wrapping tamales) John It seems that under capitalism the abstraction of doings into labor and the socialization are indistinguishable. The establishment of a social coherence or social synthesis that causes the flow of determination to turn against us is known as abstraction. The flow of determination is reversed by abstraction-socialization.14 Boris Marañón Well, regarding abstraction, through the experience of Pimentel coloniality and modernity, the production by the dominant conception of labor as a social category had the goal of legitimizing a particular method required by capitalist, modern, and colonial power to produce wealth: “abstract” and “homogeneous” work, from wage labor that simultaneously produces use value and exchange value. It is a very particular kind of paid, “productive,” job whose only attribute is the creation of excess value.15 I haven’t introduced myself, my name is Boris Marañón Pimentel, currently a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). coopia Gracias, Boris! We would like to underscore that there are no labor revolts. There are only revolts against labor. John makes this clear

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Kathi Weeks

coopia

Raquel

coopia

following Marx, who sustained that there are two layers of class conflict: the abstraction of doing into labor and the exploitation of abstract labor are both the foundations of capitalist production. Exploitation is impossible without the abstraction of doing into labor, but the abstraction of labor is imposed and reimposed through the process of exploitation. The distinction between the two modes of conflict is crucial, because in one instance we are discussing the revolt against labor, while in the other we are discussing the revolt of labor against capital.16 As Stanley Aronowitz insists, “refuse wage labor and get a life!”17   Such command implies that another life, another mode of inhabiting, “a life that is common to and shared with others” is possible.18   As wage labor colonized life, different forms of refusal have been proposed, from the right to be lazy, to the anarchist, autonomist, and feminist refusals of work. The refusal of work is not a complete renunciation of labor, but rather a refusal of the ideology of work as a highest calling and moral duty.19 I am Kathi by the way, and I study the problem with work. Refusing the abstraction and profit seeking rationality of wage labor, might require doing collectively, trans-versally, and cooperatively to trans-form our conditions and those of the territory. By trans-­versality we follow Felix Guattari’s proposal as “a dimension that tries to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere horizontality.”20 It “also connotes an intellectual mobility across discipline boundaries and above all the establishment of a continuum through theory, practice and militant action.”21 By transformation we follow Raquel and Huáscar Salazar Lohman. “The prefix ‘trans’ etymologically refers to a ‘beyond’ or ‘on the other side’, then trans-forming refers to the capacity to produce form beyond-against and beyond the given. Social trans-formation thus becomes the unfolding of the human capacity to produce and reproduce collective forms of inhabiting the world from a place other than that of domination, exploitation and dispossession.”22 We understand trans-formation as processes and potencies of change, as possibilities of imagination and action from prefigurative potencies. Trans-formations that allow the

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emergence and composition of anti-capitalist territories, not mediated by asymmetrical power relations.   The refusal of work rejects the capitalist control of production and seeks the reduction of work, in terms of both hours and social importance, and a replacement of capitalist forms of organization by new forms of cooperation.   Should we try to spatialize the conversation . . .?   In the metropolis, the planetarian urbanization we currently inhabit, we seem condemned to live to work and work to live. More than ever, it can be said that to some degree, the entire surface of the Earth is urbanized. This does not mean, of course, that there are dense crowds everywhere, but that these characteristics of urbanism, as forms-of-life, are now omnipresent.   As disciplines, both urbanism and architecture have been historically modulated and institutionalized by/for instrumental reason, and as Illich claimed, disabling professions.23 Ross Exo Adams Right now, urbanism wears an eco-sustainable resilient mask, and is, at the same time, a machine for financial speculation, a technology for isolation and exclusion, and mainly a machine for colonization and planetary expansion.24 coopia We need to talk more about alienation and fetishization in architecture and urbanism. Problematize the modes of production involved in sustaining and building this world in the hands of the building industry, financial and real estate speculation, and violent nation-states. Mabel O. Wilson, The construction industry has become more reliant on logistics Jordan Carver, and and material supply chains, which means that labor, goods, Kadambari Baxi and knowledge are sourced according to a logic of globalized material production. This can often be different for professionals in the construction industry, who may have access to better working conditions and compensation than unskilled workers.25 We looked into this through the forced migrant workers in the Arab Gulf region with Who Builds Your Architecture. coopia This also brings an aesthetic tendency of homogenization of space in general, a phenomenon easily identifiable in every major city. Several “uni-versal” tipologies shape every liveable space, this responds to the interest of transnational capitals. At the same time big real estate projects are being developed, the slums grow exponentially, these are not two separate phenomena, they are the same. Just as

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Yasser Farrés and Alberto Matarán

coopia

Braulio Jean coopia



globalization seeks the global accumulation of capital for a few through large real estate developments, it also produces inequalities for the vast majority; globalization is the planetarization of poverty. Mike Davis describes this as the planetary production of slums. This is yet another form of territorial coloniality. Regarding territorial coloniality, we draw from Santiago Castro-Gómez’s triad of coloniality of power-being-knowledge and use it to study the set of power structures that sustain the spatial and territorial dimension of coloniality. Coloniality of power can be seen in the ‘superiority’ of the urban over all other forms of non-urban existence, while coloniality of knowledge is seen in the dominance of western knowledge in professional practices, such as architecture and urbanism, and coloniality of being manifests itself in the disregard of architectural and urban practices towards the popular. Finally, colonial power is reinforced by the presence of architects, who are seen as representatives of ‘so-called’ cultural illustration. The same argument of territorial coloniality could be drawn for architectural coloniality.26–27 Thank you for situating the conversation! We feel this shouldn’t be another attempt to re-define and re-form architecture or the architect. Not another discussion regarding definitions of architecture, or what it is. We rather insist on the negation of what architecture does as a eurocentric mode of spatial socio-­ecological trans-formation with uni-versal claims, that is, a still modern, colonial, and patriarchal technology with very violent modes of spatial production. Also, a profession that is an inherent part of the building, financial, and real estate speculation industry, and most important the “soft police of power.” I have been listening attentively. My name is Braulio Hornedo Rocha a de-professionalized architect and anarchist. They even go around in black uniforms! But what about other modes of spatial-doings that reclaim and deserve their own name and place? Multiple experiences across Abya Yala show us that different forms of production around the common are possible. It is also crucial to live and sustain autonomous places since they allow us to experience other modes of life and social relationships, in order to decapitalize ourselves, as Jéromê insists.

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Jéromê

Adorno coopia Cuadernos coopia John Gustavo

Lucia

Yes! One very important thing that makes the value of our liberated spaces is that it is “about strengthening counterbehaviors. . . . It is a decisive task, since one of the greatest enemies of antisystemic movements is internal and has to do with the disasters that provoke subjectivities shaped by the values ​​of capitalist society. . . . That is why the liberated spaces, insofar as they allow one to move away from the forms it requires by the competition company and strengthen cooperative subjectivities, are properly determining factors for future advances. The fight against capitalism begins in ourselves, in our ways of relating, in our way of being and even in the depths of our inner conflicts. It is a struggle, both personal and collective, to decapitalize ourselves.”28 A bit late but I’m here. . . . My name is Jéromê Baschet, historian, professor-researcher, living between Paris and San Cristóbal de Las Casas. (Shouts from the back) Remember, remember! Anyone “who refuses to follow suit is suspect.”29 Important warning, Theodor! Ultimately the antagonism to architecture and the metropolis it sustains navigates through the realm of ontology, not an ontology of being but an ontology of becoming. The problem is not how we can imagine other modes of being architects while reproducing the struggle of labor. We insist! The struggle is against labor, any form of labor.30 ¡Sí, sí! Not imagining or reclaiming the right to be other-architects but the autonomous struggle of becoming ungovernable, beyond-against and beyond architectural identity. (Indistinct shout) Stop being architects! Stop making architecture! “Stop making capitalism!”31 “If it’s about leaving behind the capitalist relations of production, based on exploitation and alienation, what is needed is to eliminate their necessity in order to survive. . . . Instead of fighting the economic and political apparatus or trying to take it over, the challenge is to make it unnecessary, to dissolve the fundamental conditions of its existence.”32 How do we move together?

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coopia

AbdouMaliq

coopia

Isabell Lorey

coopia

AbdouMaliq

Veronica Gago coopia

Move through revolts? Revolts might occur through everyday life. These are a result of how people’s everyday actions under/by/for capitalism repeat historical and material conditions. Everyday life gives us the possibility of creating what John calls cracks, rejecting capitalism. These actions full of dignity open time-spaces of denial that could become “other doings” where we take control of our own lives. In this sense, people are caught within the middle of varying trajectories of trying to preserve the kinds of accomplishments that they’ve made but always having to use them as a platform of trying to exceed them at the same time.33 This dilemma is further explained by what has been shared regarding social trans-formation by Raquel and Huáscar. These trans-­formations procure a collective character, and they arise as particular processes of insubordination and struggles that weave networks of “doing-against-work” to transform the “here-and-now.”   And . . . might lead to revolts following a process of negative dialectics in which it is necessary to refuse various processes of precarization. Processes generated by forms of governmentality that unequally manage the effects of precarious conditions. This can lead to revolts! The reasons for the inflammatory viral infection, however, are no longer to be found (only) in the unreasonable political and economic impositions to which the marginalized are subject but consist rather in the normalization of precarization throughout the whole of society.34 This state of normalization creates asymmetrical spatialities that reproduce invisible/disposable people that at the same time produce new spatialities, always and in all kinds of forms, not only marginal but time-spaces of struggle. These spaces created “from below” are singular and conducive to collective actions because they feature a darkness that provides cover for experiments residents may initiate but are not yet ready to commit fully to and also allows to contain “secret histories” that activate the collective capacity to trans-form reality.35 From the common as that to be dispossessed.36 That is where the disruption of revolt occurs, when there is an outburst that leads towards integral autonomy.

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Mina coopia

Gustavo coopia

Arturo

coopia Mina

But, especially to autonomy as prefiguration: that envisions and practices today, the forms that will replace the relations of domination and exploitation.37 (Arturo Anguiano joins) Revolts take power away from the metropolis as a transversal dispositif to everyday life, hence the common is a political act of autonomy that composes the revolts in that . . . (Interrupts) Autonomy can be defined as a revolt of doing versus working, against and beyond the logic of capitalist rationality.38 . . . revolts lead to alternatives, these arise in social movements whose forms of action are as varied as the causes that originate them and the people who carry them out but whose common denominator is to break the limits of the metropolis, and trans-form the social fabric. It is at this moment that everyday revolts begin as the rejection and resistance of the oppressed against degraded and insecure working conditions, against a difficult and increasingly precarious existence.39   . . . And it is necessary to combine old and new forms of organization that allow organized societies capable of “inventing forms of expression, communication”40   . . . and action to weave new relationships of “solidarity, exchange and coexistence.”41 That as a central strategy imagine other modes of sustaining life in common. Las luchas por lo común, struggles for the common42 evidence the trans-formation of the common towards other ways of sharing or revolts to produce the common for the reproduction of life from Abya Ayala.

ACT 3—Comer: The Common of Autonomies

coopia

(While eating tamales) The notion of the commons has a particular context and history; the term relates to common land, and is mostly situated in the United Kingdom. It is defined as a shared territory where land and resources were accessible to all the members of a defined society. That ended with the Enclosure or Inclosure Acts of 1604. Over the last decades the concept of the commons has diversified its pool of resources, and

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in terms of what can be shared, specially, what actions can be shared. We would like now to situate the conversation around modes of sharing, or practices of commoning in Abya Yala. Silvia and George “The commons are not only the means by which we share in an egalitarian manner the resources we produce, but a commitment to the creation of collective subjects, a commitment to fostering common interests in every aspect of our life.”43 coopia It is in this sense that we rather bring various terms from other contexts and genealogies, beyond-against and beyond capitalist and eurocentric logics, related to the concept of sharing and the production of commons. Raquel It is important to situate various terms related to the concept of la producción de lo común or the production of the common, the work we have been doing together with Lucia and Mina. coopia In the last decades of the 20th century, in Abya Yala the understanding of the common as a verb, and not as a noun has had different practices and discourses. The Oaxaqueño thinkers Floriberto Díaz Gómez and Jaime Martínez Luna coined the term comunalidad or communality to describe the communal practices in the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca and southern regions of México. Gustavo and Comunalidad is “the verbal predicate of Us. It names its Arturo Guerrero action and not its ontology; it refers to embodied verbs: eating, speaking, learning . . . performed collectively on a specific land.”44 Indistinct voices It is also from this paradigm that we understand the common! Raúl The foundation of the common are collective works by mutual aid: minga, tequio, guelaguetza, mano vuelta, among many others, as has been called in the territory of Abya Yala. Not the so-called common resources because those are related to an economic paradigm, or neither the understanding of the community as an institution. In any case, the foundation of the common is the result of collective actions.45 Raquel These ideas can be reinforced through three analytical keys of the communal. First, neither the indigenous is inherently communal, nor the communitarian is inherently indigenous. Second, since the communitarian is a social

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coopia



Jóvenes en Resistencia Alternativa

relationship, it is cultivated and practiced. And the third key, as a proposition, prior to anything else, the production of the communal implies cultivation, revitalization, regeneration, and reconstruction of that which is necessary to ensure collective life, against and beyond the divisions and negations imposed by the logic of dispossession and patriarchal exploitation of capital, reinforced by the state and its political forms.46 Through these reflections on the production of the common, we would like to put forward the notion of the common as that integral flow of practices, affects, things, and places that re-unite us from the ethics of reciprocity, from solidarity, mutual-aid and the harmonious coexistence of differences. The communal as modes of collaboration, association and cooperation, and the community as associations, configurations and processes in constant trans-formation that arise through relations of doing in common.   Now that we have been talking about the production of the common, we feel it’s important to weave the dialogue with autonomy, as both are entangled ­discursive-practices. Both move beyond static institutions to situated practices of emancipatory movements. Situated from the socio-­ecological experiences in Abya Yala, autonomy is crossed by three anti-capitalist archives or historical forces: anti-colonial movements—indigenous, campesino and Black peoples—, anarchisms and autonomous or most recently open Marxism.47 These three archives are related to multidimensional autonomy, articulated by four modes: “first, autonomy as a mode of doing politics, challenges hierarchy, subordination, and heteronomy. . . . Second, autonomy as diversity, power, and possibility challenges totality and unity if they are seen as homogeneity and domination. Third, the forms that will replace the relations of dominance and exploitation are envisioned and practiced today through prefiguration. It criticizes the strategy of social change that was pushed back till tomorrow and radicalizes the strategy of REVOLUTION TODAY, . . . forms that anticipate and prefigure other worlds. And lastly, in order to consider and imagine a radical shift in the modes of production, distribution, and consumption, as well as a fundamental shift in the modes of decision-making about the common, we might use autonomy as an emancipatory horizon. It enables us to

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Ana



coopia

Gustavo John

coopia Raúl

see a society devoid of capital, in a symbiotic relationship with the non-human world, and free from forms of state dominance, oppression, centralization, homogenization, and monopolization.”48 In 1994 autonomy took a sharp turn “with the Zapatistas’ uprising in Chiapas, México, when indigenous communities politically organized with the EZLN, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, (Zapatista National Liberation Army) stood against neo-liberalism.”49   Following Ernst Bloch, he defined autonomy as “the art of organizing hope (prefiguration) comprises four interlocked modes: negating the given, creating concrete utopia, navigating contradictions and producing overflows of human activity beyond demarcation.”50 Situated beyond-against and beyond the experience of coloniality. As the socio-environmental power asymmetries imposed by the amalgam of patriarchy-capitalism and colonial domination, present in the domination of authority, knowledge, and modes of being. We recognize anti-colonial autonomies as modes of problematizing power relations through self-determined and self-managing collectivities that imagine and prefigure anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal presents and enable the material and symbolic re-production of life. Also, as situated efforts of trans-formation, of other lives, other territories, and other worlds, that weave and grow the common. But what are the practices, the paths of/for autonomy?   “Rather than autonomy, there are autonomies, both in reality and as political projects, as mobilizing myths and as horizons—as what is not yet.”51 Autonomies as negation and the search of alternative doings. “The very idea of an autonomous space or moment indicates a break with the dominant logic, a breach or a change of course in the flow of social determination. . . . We will not accept an alien or external determination of our activity, we will determine what we will do. We refuse, we refuse to accept outside determination; and we oppose that externally imposed activity with an activity of our own choice, an alternative doing.”52 What are the spatialities and territorialities of autonomy? Integral autonomy is composed by the triad of spatial control, self-management and self-government.53

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Ana

Regarding Gustavo’s and coopia’s questions, I  could add some reflections on the common and four modes of autonomy: negating, creating, contradicting, and exceeding, as for creating I draw diverse trajectories expanding on selfinstitution of society, self-valorization and the common. Regarding the common and how it indicates that autonomy is a spatial practice, we might follow the work of the geographer and campaigner Paul Chatterton who argues that “an appreciation of spatial practice has deepened our understanding of processes of political autonomy. The common, in particular, has become a striking spatial motif, evoking territories governed by a group of people. . . . The common is a complex social and political ecology. . . . The common, then, is a verb and a noun, and commoning is a crucial socio-spatial practice in the struggle for a better world. The common has become a key tactical repertoire in the struggle against spatial enclosure.”54

ACT 4—Salir: Horizons of Autonomous Doings, Spatialities and Inhabitings

coopia



(Serving coffee) Instead of maintaining our forms of doing within the realm of architectural production, subsumed in the logics of capitalism, we would like to recognize, what we call provisionally, the revolts of spatial-doings against architectural labor. Doings that compose new complicities, in order to ­imagine, share and build multiple worlds, multiple spatialities grounded on the common and autonomy. As Arturo Escobar insists “in the face of a genuine crisis of our modes of existence in the world, it is credible that we can constitute the conjuncture as a struggle for a new reality, what could be called the pluriverse” (Escobar 2020). There are modes of spatial-doings that reclaim and deserve their own name and place. Multiple experiences across Abya Yala show us that different forms of doings and inhabitings around the common are possible.   Rather than insisting on alternative architectures, anarchitectures, non-­architectures, etc, we are compelled to conmovernos, beyond-against and beyond architecture, and continue the path walked by Jean Robert regarding his opposition of place and space, towards autonomous modes of

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Consejo

coopia



Gustavo and Consejo

coopia



place-making, of inhabiting and making a living, of worldmaking, not in a planetary sense but as material and symbolic relations of becoming in/with/through the world. Where might these revolts occur? Well .  .  . “there are no metropolitan revolts, but revolts against the metropolis.”55   Those who automatically interpret the sentence ‘leave the metropolis’ as a call to ‘move to the countryside’ are erroneous. As long as the historical underpinnings attributed to it by the economies of power are not deactivated, what is typically referred to as ‘the countryside’—a region of basic activities that are sufficient to live well—does not lead to any route out.56 These revolts are already happening, some through integral autonomy as the Zapatista and Kurdish experience in Rojava, others through partial autonomy as the Nasa experience of proceso de liberación de la Madre Tierra, Uma Kiwe—Mother Earth’s liberation process—, FUCVAM’s cooperative housing by mutual-aid, or the multifarious experiences of Producción y Gestión Social del Hábitat— Social Production and Management of Habitat. All we need is to hear and be open to unusual dialogues.   So .  .  . let’s stop making architecture! Both Esteva and Holloway emphatically argue that since capitalism is first and foremost a social relation, revolts are not about destroying capitalism, but about refusing to create it. Let’s “stop making capitalism!”57 And create something new. In one of his most famous books, John proposes to change the world without taking power, the book sparked various controversies, and we claim that “it is necessary to add a tactical gloss to the enunciation of the pro-Zapatistas: ‘To change the world without taking power,’ yes, but by constituting a potency. It is by constituting a potency that we can go beyond the merely anti-­authoritarian, infertile stage in which the sphere of classical politics is stagnant.”58 This potency, or potencies, might be mobilized through territorial trans-­formation, a change of forms through these which compose the material and symbolic horizons of sustaining life.   We would like to close with some remarks regarding size, limits, proportion, and reach. We are in no way suggesting or promoting a uni-versal revolt against architectural

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Roberto Ochoa



Elías González Gómez

coopia



labor, we rather would like to con-mover with a multiplicity of horizons, situated and proportional revolts that move towards autonomous inhabiting. Regarding size, limits, and proportion, I  draw from the work initiated by Leopold Kohr and Ernst F. Schumacher, and continued by Illich, as an urgent “revision of modern political theory, which has abandoned the consideration of the human scale as an essential element for political activity.”59   In, Muerte Al Leviatán: Principios Para Una Política Desde La Gente, I hold that Leopold Kohr’s theories, published since 1957, have been missed and rejected by academia, the intellectual world, and, of course, politicians since western modernity is dominated by a leviathan mentality, which is seduced by grandeur and power.60 Regarding proportion, Roberto draws from Illich work on music theory and elucidates that when he uses the Greek word logos, which can also mean word, balance, definition, or proportion, he talks about proportion. He believes that the appropriateness of a relationship would be the most accurate definition of proportion.61–62 We feel these observations are related to what Raquel calls, alcance práctico, practical reach refers to a struggle’s collection of characteristics and implications that can be fully understood by paying attention to the struggle action itself, including the struggle’s local, regional, national, or international character, its ability to disrupt and suspend capitalism’s daily operations, the way it disrupts the given and pre-established times of capital accumulation and political command.63 Such practical reach has to engage a certain proportion, with the appropriate relation of struggle, in order to con-movernos towards autonomous horizons and inhabitings beyond-against and beyond the amalgam of patriarchy-capitalism and colonial domination.   Horizons, as Raúl beautifully notes, that practice “planting as a ritual attitude of life, without the ambition of also being the one who harvests.”64 (Loud voices) Adios!

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Notes 1 Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983). 2 cuadernos de NEGACIÓN, Cuaderno de Negación 2: CLASES SOCIALES (o La Maldita Costumbre de Llamar a Las Cosas Por Su Nombre 2) (Rosario: Lazo Negro Ediciones, 2009). 3 Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, “Horizontes Comunitario-Populares: Producción de Lo Común Más Allá de Las Políticas Estado-Céntricas,” Traficantes de sueños (2017): 88. 4 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004), 11. 5 Ibid., 5. 6 Ibid. 7 John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, and Sergio Tischler, eds., Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 8. 8 Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, “Beyond the ‘Capacity to Veto’: Reflections from Latin America on the Production and Reproduction of the Common,” South Atlantic ­Quarterly 113, no. 2 (2014): 260. 9 John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 3. 10 Consejo Nocturno, Un Habitar Más Fuerte Que La Metrópoli (Logroño: Pepitas de Calabaza SL, 2018), 88. 11 Jean Robert, “El arte de habitar no se deja alfabetizar,” The International Journal of Illich Studies 8, no. 2 (2021): 210. 12 Iván Illich, “El arte de habitar,” in Obras reunidas Vol 2, eds. Javier Sicilia and Valentina Borremans (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015), 465. 13 Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, “Beyond the ‘Capacity to Veto’: Reflections from Latin America on the Production and Reproduction of the Common,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 2 (2014): 260. 14 John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 3. 15 Boris Marañón Pimentel, “La colonialidad del trabajo,” Controversias y Concurrencias Latinoamericanas 9, no. 15 (2017): 20–36. 16 John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 155–56. 17 Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler, Post-Work (London: Routledge, 1998), 40. 18 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 232. 19 Ibid., 99. 20 Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Reprint edition (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England and New York: Penguin, 1984), 18. 21 Ibid., 3. 22 Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and Huáscar Salazar, “Reproducción Comunitaria de La Vida. Pensando La Transformación Social En El Presente,” El Apantle, Revista de Estudios Comunitarios 1 (2015): 19. 23 Iván Illich, “Disabling Professions,” India International Centre Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1978): 23–32. 24 Ross Exo Adams, “Notes from the Resilient City,” Log 32 (Fall 2014): 126–39. 25 Mabel O. Wilson, Jordan Carver, and Kadambari Baxi, “Working Globally: The Human Networks of Transnational Architectural Projects,” in The Architect as

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Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, ed. Peggy Deamer (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 26 Yasser Farrés Delgado and Alberto Matarán Ruiz, “Colonialidad Territorial: Para Analizar A Foucault En El Marco De La Desterritorialización De La Metrópoli. Notas Desde La Habana,” TABULA RASA 21 (2012); Yasser Farrés Delgado and Alberto Matarán Ruiz, “Hacia una teoría urbana transmoderna y decolonial: una introducción,” Polis (Santiago) 13, no. 37 (2014): 339–61. 27 Yasser Farrés Delgado, “Colonialidad Territorial Y Evolución Urbana En La Habana,” Apuntes. Revista de estudios sobre patrimonio cultural 28, no. 1 (2015); Yasser Farrés Delgado, “Dialogar con Quijano,” Revista de Sociología, no. 28 (October 2019): 49–64. 28 Jéromê Baschet, “Ya estamos en camino, haciendo otros mundos,” in Rebelarse Desde El Nosotrxs, eds. Gustavo Esteva, Vilma Rocío Almendra Quiguanás, and Emmanuel Rozental (Querétaro: En cortito que’s pa’largo, 2013). 29 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004), 61. 30 cuadernos de NEGACIÓN, Cuaderno de Negación 2: CLASES SOCIALES (o La Maldita Costumbre de Llamar a Las Cosas Por Su Nombre 2) (Rosario: Lazo Negro Ediciones, 2009), 90. 31 John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 254. 32 Gustavo Esteva, “Tiempos de indignación, tiempos de reflexión,” in Rebelarse Desde El Nosotrxs, eds. Jéromê Baschet, Vilma Rocío Almendra Quiguanás, and Emmanuel Rozental (Querétaro: En cortito que’s pa’largo, 2013). 33 AbdouMaliq Simone, Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South, After the Postcolonial (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity, 2018). 34 Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (New York: Verso, 2015). 35 AbdouMaliq Simone, Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South, After the Postcolonial (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity, 2018). 36 Verónica Gago, Lo Común En Disputa, Clase 1, 2018. Online lecture https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=VwQDtD6JvNI. 37 Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo, Luchas por lo común: antagonismo social contra el despojo capitalista de los bienes naturales en México (CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2015). 38 Gustavo Esteva, “The Hour of Autonomy,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 10, no. 1 (2015): 134–45. 39 Arturo Anguiano, “La revuelta cotidiana. Política de los oprimidos hacia la emancipación,” Vientosur (2010): 5. https://vientosur.info/la-revuelta-cotidiana-politica-delos-oprimidos-hacia-la-emancipacion/. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo, Luchas por lo común: antagonismo social contra el despojo capitalista de los bienes naturales en México (CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2015). 43 George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, “Commons against and Beyond Capitalism,” Community Development Journal 49, Supplement 1: Commons Sense: New thinking about an old idea (January 2014): 92–105. 44 Gustavo Esteva and Arturo Guerrero Osorio, “Usos, Ideas y Perspectivas de La Comunalidad,” in Comunalidad, Tramas Comunitarias y Producción de Lo Común. Debates Contemporáneos Desde América Latina, ed. Raquel Gutiérrez (Oaxaca: Colectivo Pez en el Árbol, 2018), 33–50. 45 Raúl Zibechi, “Los Trabajos Colectivos Como Bienes Comunes Material/Simbólicos,” El Apantle, Revista de Estudios Comunitarios 1 (2015). 46 Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, “Producir Lo Común: Entramados Comunitarios y Formas de Lo Político,” Re-Visiones 10, no. 3 (2020).

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47 Bajo Tierra Ediciones, ed. Pensar las autonomías: Alternativas de emancipación al capital y el Estado (CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2011), 12. 48 Bajo Tierra Ediciones, ed. Pensar las autonomías: Alternativas de emancipación al capital y el Estado (CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2011), 10. 49 A. Dinerstein, The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2. 50 Ibid. 51 Gustavo Esteva, “Autonomy,” in Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, eds. Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 99. 52 John Holloway, “Las grietas y la crisis del trabajo abstracto,” in Pensar las autonomías: Alternativas de emancipación al capital y el Estado, ed. Bajo Tierra Ediciones (CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2011), 318. 53 Raúl Zibechi, Autonomías y Emancipaciones: América Latina En Movimiento. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de (CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2007), 128. 54 Paul Chatterton, “Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self-management, and the Common.” Antipode 42, no. 4 (2010): 901. 55 Consejo Nocturno, Un Habitar Más Fuerte Que La Metrópoli (Logroño: Pepitas de Calabaza SL, 2018), 91. 56 Ibid., 70. 57 John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 254. 58 Consejo Nocturno, Un Habitar Más Fuerte Que La Metrópoli (Logroño: Pepitas de Calabaza SL, 2018), 120. 59 Roberto Ochoa, “Umbrales en el pensamiento,” Polis (Santiago) 11, no. 33 (2012): 255–68. 60 Roberto Ochoa, Muerte al Leviatán: principios para una política desde la gente (México: Serie Conspiratio, 2009). 61 Alberto Elías González Gómez, Convivencialidad y Resistencia Política Desde Abajo: La Herencia de Iván Illich En México (Guadalajara: Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, 2022). 62 Iván Illich, The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr, E. F. Schumacher lecture (Great Barrington, MA: Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 1996). https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/the-wisdom-of-leopold-kohr/. 63 Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, “Horizontes Comunitario-Populares: Producción de Lo Común Más Allá de Las Políticas Estado-Céntricas,” Traficantes de sueños (2017): 32. 64 Raúl Zibechi, Descolonizar El Pensamiento Crítico y Las Rebeldías. Autonomías y Emancipaciones En La Era Del Progresismo (CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2015), 383.

Bibliography Adams, Ross Exo. “Notes from the Resilient City.” Log 32 (Fall 2014): 126–39. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 2004. Anguiano, Arturo. “La revuelta cotidiana. Política de los oprimidos hacia la emancipación.” Vientosur (2010). https://vientosur.info/la-revuelta-cotidiana-politica-de-losoprimidos-hacia-la-emancipacion/. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983.

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Aronowitz, Stanley, and Jonathan Cutler. Post-Work. London: Routledge, 1998. Bajo Tierra Ediciones, ed. Pensar las autonomías: Alternativas de emancipación al capital y el Estado. CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2011. Baschet, Jéromê. “Ya estamos en camino, haciendo otros mundos.” In Rebelarse Desde El Nosotrxs, edited by Gustavo Esteva, Vilma Rocío Almendra Quiguanás, and Emmanuel Rozental. Querétaro: En cortito que ́s pa ́ largo, 2013. Caffentzis, George, and Silvia Federici. “Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism.” Community Development Journal 49, Supplement 1: Commons Sense: New Thinking About an Old Idea (January 2014): 92–105. Chatterton, Paul. “Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self-management, and the Common.” Antipode 42, no. 4 (2010): 897–908. Consejo Nocturno. Un Habitar Más Fuerte Que La Metrópoli. Logroño: Pepitas de Calabaza SL, 2018. cuadernos de NEGACIÓN. Contra El Estado y La Mercancía | Compilación de Cuadernos de Negación Nros 2 al 5. Rosario: Lazo Negro Ediciones, 2017. cuadernos de NEGACIÓN. Cuaderno de Negación 2: CLASES SOCIALES (o La Maldita Costumbre de Llamar a Las Cosas Por Su Nombre 2). Rosario: Lazo Negro Ediciones, 2009. Dinerstein, A. The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Escobar, Arturo. “Política pluriversal: lo real y lo posible en el pensamiento crítico y las luchas latinoamericanas contemporáneas.” Tabula Rasa, no. 36 (2020): 323–54. Esteva, Gustavo. “Autonomy.” In Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Esteva, Gustavo. “The Hour of Autonomy.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 10, no. 1 (2015): 134–45. Esteva, Gustavo. “Tiempos de indignación, tiempos de reflexión.” In Rebelarse Desde El Nosotrxs, edited by Jéromê Baschet, Vilma Rocío Almendra Quiguanás, and Emmanuel Rozental. Querétaro: En cortito que ́s pa ́ largo, 2013. Esteva, Gustavo, and Arturo Guerrero Osorio. “Usos, Ideas y Perspectivas de La Comunalidad.” In Comunalidad, Tramas Comunitarias y Producción de Lo Común. Debates Contemporáneos Desde América Latina, edited by Raquel Gutiérrez, 33–50. Oaxaca: Colectivo Pez en el Árbol, 2018. Facultad Libre, dir. Lo Común En Disputa | Por Verónica Gago | Clase 1. (2018). www. youtube.com/watch?v=VwQDtD6JvNI. Farrés Delgado, Yasser. “Colonialidad Territorial Y Evolución Urbana En La Habana.” Apuntes. Revista de estudios sobre patrimonio cultural 28, no. 1 (2015). Farrés Delgado, Yasser. “Dialogar con Quijano.” Revista de Sociología, no. 28 (October 2019): 49–64. Farrés Delgado, Yasser, and Alberto Matarán Ruiz. “Colonialidad Territorial: Para Analizar A  Foucault En El Marco De La Desterritorialización De La Metrópoli. Notas Desde La Habana.” TABULA RASA 21 (2012). Farrés Delgado, Yasser, and Alberto Matarán Ruiz. “Hacia una teoría urbana transmoderna y decolonial: una introducción.” Polis (Santiago) 13, no. 37 (2014): 339–61. Gago, Verónica. Lo Común En Disputa | Por Verónica Gago | Clase 1. (2018). https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwQDtD6JvNI.

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González Gómez, Alberto Elías. Convivencialidad y Resistencia Política Desde Abajo: La Herencia de Iván Illich En México. Guadalajara: Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, 2022. Guattari, Felix. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. Reprint ed. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England and New York, NY: Penguin, 1984. Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel. “Beyond the ‘Capacity to Veto’: Reflections from Latin America on the Production and Reproduction of the Common.” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 2 (2014): 259–70. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2643603. Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel. Horizontes Comunitario-Populares: Producción de Lo Común Más Allá de Las Políticas Estado-Céntricas. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2017. Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel. “Producir Lo Común: Entramados Comunitarios y Formas de Lo Político.” Re-Visiones 10, no. 3 (2020). Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel, and Huáscar Salazar. “Reproducción Comunitaria de La Vida. Pensando La Transformación Social En El Presente.” El Apantle, Revista de Estudios Comunitarios 1 (2015). Holloway, John. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2010. Holloway, John. “Las grietas y la crisis del trabajo abstracto.” In Pensar las autonomías: Alternativas de emancipación al capital y el Estado, edited by Bajo Tierra Ediciones. CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2011. Holloway, John, Fernando Matamoros, and Sergio Tischler, eds. Negativity And Revolution: Adorno And Political Activism. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Illich, Iván. “Disabling Professions.” India International Centre Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1978): 23–32. Illich, Iván. “El arte de habitar.” In Obras reunidas, vol. 2, edited by Javier Sicilia and Valentina Borremans. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015. Illich, Iván. The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr. E. F. Schumacher Lecture, Great Barrington, MA: Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 1996. https://centerforneweconomics. org/publications/the-wisdom-of-leopold-kohr/ Lorey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. New York: Verso, 2015. Marañón Pimentel, Boris. “La colonialidad del trabajo.” Controversias y Concurrencias Latinoamericanas 9, no. 15 (2017): 20–36. Navarro Trujillo, Mina Lorena. Luchas por lo común: antagonismo social contra el despojo capitalista de los bienes naturales en México. CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2015. Ochoa, Roberto. Muerte al Leviatán: principios para una política desde la gente. México: Serie Conspiratio, 2009. Ochoa, Roberto. “Umbrales en el pensamiento.” Polis (Santiago) 11, no. 33 (2012): 255–68. Robert, Jean. “El arte de habitar no se deja alfabetizar.” The International Journal of Illich Studies 8, no. 2 (2021): 201–10. Simone, AbdouMaliq. Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South. After the Postcolonial. Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity, 2018. Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Wilson, Mabel O, Jordan Carver, and Kadambari Baxi. “Working Globally: The Human Networks of Transnational Architectural Projects.” In The Architect as Worker:

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Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, edited by Peggy Deamer. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Zibechi, Raúl. Autonomías y Emancipaciones: América Latina En Movimiento. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2007. Zibechi, Raúl. Descolonizar El Pensamiento Crítico y Las Rebeldías. Autonomías y Emancipaciones En La Era Del Progresismo. CDMX: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2015. Zibechi, Raúl. “Los Trabajos Colectivos Como Bienes Comunes Material/Simbólicos.” El Apantle, Revista de Estudios Comunitarios 1 (2015).

PART II

Territories

7 BLACK SPATIAL INTONATION1 Emanuel Admassu

I am interested in spatial practices that overwhelm or overflow the formal boundaries of architecture and urban design. Black spatial practices negate racialized schemas by introducing ideas that stretch space and time. They offer nuanced understandings of form with rituals, movements, and sedimentations of culture and politics. This text considers these practices and experiences on both sides of the Atlantic. If one were to stretch Arthur Jaffa’s concept of Black visual intonation (BVI) to the spatial realm, it would occupy the difference between content (liberatory acts of Black life) and container (anti-Black enclosures). Everyday spaces of Addis Ababa and Atlanta could be read as sites of Black spatial intonation situated between technologies of containment and the choreographies of liberation. Ghebbi

We know the commons because we make them every day. My most recent visit to Addis Ababa was in July 2022, with my partner and our 2-year-old son; reinitiating yearly visits that had been interrupted by the pandemic. We traded the summer heat of New York City for the cool winter rain of Addis Ababa. A ghebbi, where my grandparents settled in the 1940s, served as our home for the brief visit. Shortly before we arrived, city officials had decided to demolish the front section of the perimeter wall that surrounded the plot, citing plans to widen the street in accordance with the latest masterplan. A temporary corrugated metal fence was built to denote the boundary. Over the past thirty years, several masterplans have been proposed for the city of Addis Ababa; each iteration serves as a time capsule, documenting domestic aspirations and geopolitical incursions. DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-10

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FIGURE 7.1 Ghebbi

Study I, 2022, Image by AD—WO

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The Amharic word ghebbi connotes a territory surrounded by a fence. Growing up, I understood our ghebbi as a space of refuge carved out of the restless and errant city of Addis Ababa. Ghebbis have registered critical shifts in the city’s history. Spatial and social transformations from a temporary settlement for a mobile army in the late nineteenth century to a bustling African capital in the twenty-first century. When Benito Mussolini’s army invaded Ethiopia in 1936 claiming and absorbing the region into Italian East Africa, surveyors were able to clearly identify the centers of power: the emperor’s palace, the main churches, mosques, and marketplaces. The spaces between these nodes were occupied by a collection of ghebbis; each with its own set of indoor and outdoor spaces, loosely defined by a simple fence and door. They were terrra nulius to the colonial army but functioned as critical sites of resistance and organizing for the local populace. During the five-year occupation (1936–1941) Italian settlers took over the city center; displacing the Black population to an area they named Merkato Indigeno. The strict grid of the new settlement, in the northwestern periphery, was designed to enclose the social lives of Africans, operating in contradistinction to the openness of the existing city. But shortly after the occupation, Merkato was absorbed by the ghebbis. The word ghebbi evokes a sense of ambiguity akin to an Amharic linguistic strategy called Sem ena Worq (wax and gold), where slight shifts in enunciation produce different meanings. When used by local poets and musicians, the wax layer represents the superficial, initial meaning of a word or phrase while the gold represents a deeper meaning; a veiled social critique directed at the people in positions of power. For example, depending on how one enunciates the world ghebbi, it could mean: a fenced in area, come in, a welcoming invitation, or a threatening infiltration. Its spatial and linguistic connotation is contingent and relational. In the 1960s and 1970s the feudal nation-state that had been inherited and solidified by Emperor Haile Selassie I was troubled by a Marxist student movement. The transnational student movement imagined regionally and historically specific forms of commons. The theoretical implications of this spatial and political transformation—from feudalism to socialism—were debated, sharpened, and imagined through various publications and convenings, producing ambitious visions that were anchored around questions of land tenure and the slogan: land to the tiller.2 The anti-capitalist, anti-colonial discourse cultivated by African intellectuals on and off the continent were translated into a set of ideological interventions that were specific to the historical conditions of nation building in the Horn of Africa. The movement cultivated a collective consciousness that was instrumental in toppling the monarchy. It offered clear alternatives; a clear vision for an egalitarian society that could be built from the ravages of neocolonialism. But this brief moment of collective imagination was tempered by the Cold War. The energy and ideas cultivated by the student movement were coopted and reduced to slogans by a brutal military junta, the Derg (1974–1991) and subsumed in the powerful hybridization of tribalism and neoliberalism by

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the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF 1991–2019) and currently, the so-called Prosperity Party (2019–). In describing the contradictions between the promise of nationalized land and the realities of speculation in Addis Ababa, Elleni Centime Zeleke writes: What is most striking about the urban renewal programme in Addis Ababa is that it has been supported through the piecemeal introduction of legislation that has made urban land available to private investors as leasehold. This in turn has allowed leasehold rights in urban areas to be sold on the free market. In addition, the introduction of a free market in urban land leases had guaranteed a bundle of usufruct rights to lessors that closely resemble private property rights. This is despite the fact that Ethiopian constitution guarantees that all land in Ethiopia is vested in the nations, nationalities, and peoples of the federal republic and cannot be subject to sale.3 Slippages between property and leasehold—between collective stewardship and individuation—define the current predicament of ghebbis. Leaseholders who fail to build up and densify their plots in accordance with the latest masterplan risk expropriation. The state transfers plots from those who simply want to live on and share the earth to those who want to develop and sell land. Threats of dispossession have transformed Addis Ababa into a continuous construction site for the past twenty years. Large swaths of working-class neighborhoods are demolished and transformed into parks and amenities for the wealthy. Spaces of communality and mutual aid are being replaced by the relentless demand for development. A recent masterplan for Addis Ababa proposed an expansion of the metropolitan region by 54,000 hectares into the surrounding Oromo National Regional State. The Oromo people are the majority ethnic group in Ethiopia. The decision to expand the capital into a territory occupied by a group of people that have been historically marginalized by the nation-state led to a powerful uprising that eventually dissolved the EPRDF. Echoing previous shifts in government, the ascendance of the current prime minister was fashioned through fierce resistance to displacement and dispossession. In fact, the past fifty years of Ethiopia’s political history can be narrated through an iterative set of interventions by ordinary Ethiopians, against the regime of property. The ghebbis of Addis Ababa exemplify the multi-scalar infiltrations, designed from places far away, that force us to reckon with the impossibility of sovereignty. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes: It seems it is the fate of Africa to have her destiny always decided around conference tables in metropolises of the Western world: her submergence from self-governing communities into colonies was decided in Berlin; her more

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recent transition into neocolonies along the same boundaries was negotiated around the same tables in London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon.4 During my visits home, I  spend a lot of time discussing foreign currency with friends and family. Ethiopians, like most Africans, are preoccupied with devaluation: ontologies fashioned by the pressure to participate within and against a world order that maintains a value gap. The longue durée of European imperial expansion has constructed a global economic system where African currencies keep losing value while Euro-American currencies remain constant and reliable. What are commons after racial slavery, continental partition, and structural adjustment programs? Monetary devaluation is spatialized through practices that convert every square meter in Addis Ababa (and elsewhere in Africa) into a funnel for foreign currency. This, by and large, has created a scenario where the urban form of African cities is determined from afar; by those who have access to dollars, euros, and pounds (foreign investors and the diaspora). The ghebbis of Addis Ababa are part of the chorus, the ongoing struggle by Africans to seize back their lands, resources, and cultural artifacts from the “Euro-American-based stranglehold.”5 There is no route to the commons that doesn’t go past the necessary threshold of reparations. In other words, there is no commons without history. Tactically dissolving the colonial borders that riddle the continent, has to be at the heart of any project that imagines an African spatial and urban identity in the twenty-first century. Unlike the postcolonial era where African countries were divided according to the European languages they were forced to speak, the formal and aesthetic influences of the twenty-first century are more ambiguous. But it is safe to say that conference tables in Beijing have taken the place of conference tables in Berlin. Material and formal influences are imported: bathroom fixtures, window systems, and kitchen cabinets arrive in shipping containers from Dubai, Mumbai, and Shanghai. The pride associated with defeating the Italian colonial army in 1896 was embedded in everything I  consumed during my upbringings in Addis Ababa. Iconic paintings like Belachew Yimer’s depiction of the Battle of Adwa narrate Ethiopia’s claims of exceptionality as the only nation in Africa that successfully resisted European colonization. These nation building narratives downplay the significance of the Italian occupation, the brutality of empire, the collusions of the Cold War, and the ongoing expropriation of resources. Instead, elegant images of Emperor Menelik II accompanied by a group of his dignitaries are etched into the nation’s collective memory. Ethiopia’s victory in the Battle of Adwa masked the nation’s entanglements with complex vectors of power. Fences and borders have failed to protect us. This failure has produced a heightened sense of relationality that opens up space for other ways of being in and with the world. We have not been able to fully determine the form of the spaces we occupy, but we have always been able to control what we do in those spaces: rituals that present temporal misalignments between form and meaning.

FIGURE 7.2 Immeasurability: The Ridge (detail),

2020, Image by AD—WO

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Ridge

Meditating on Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, Saidiya Hartman writes: These notes on belonging everywhere warn of the dangers of the origin story and the passport, and in its stead offer catachresis and prophesy rather than solution.6 The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is the longest mountain range on Earth, situated on the ocean floor between Africa and the Americas. In the 1950s, Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen produced the first map of the Atlantic Ocean floor, using depthsounding instruments to construct a detailed image of the cracks, valleys, and peaks caused by continental drift. Tharp and Heezen subsequently collaborated with the landscape painter Heinrich Berann to produce a painting of the MidAtlantic Ridge. Our work, Immeasurabiltiy, initially conceived for the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America complicates the image of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge by overlaying it with notations that acknowledge its historical significance in the formation of Blackness.7 The affective and metaphorical power of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is augmented by the fact that it cannot be captured via satellite imagery. It requires “remote investigation,” using sound to map the landscape hidden by the waves of the ocean.8 The sonic resonances of this submerged condition, what Tina Campt might call the “phonic substance” deep below the water surface, present a powerful image to think with and about the incalculable loss of Black life during and since the Middle Passage.9 Immeasurability examines the planetary implications of the ridge/rift caused by racial slavery. It also marks the “unpayable debt” and the ongoing entanglements between Africa and the Americas.10 Our notational explorations of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge superimpose contemporary forms of surveillance and enclosure with the history of cartographic practices. The aim was to work against specific terms and images: including maps of the wind and current patterns on the Atlantic Ocean depicted by Matthew Fontaine Maury, nicknamed “pathfinder of the seas.” Maury’s maps were produced for slave traders who were navigating the winds of the Atlantic. Measuring not only land but also wind and ocean current patterns to facilitate the Atlantic slave trade. Flow

In the Chapter 7 of Black Marxism, titled “The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition,” Cedric Robinson writes: The renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed

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for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses. For them defeat or victory was an internal affair. Like those in the 1950s who took to the mountains and forests of Kenya to become the Land and Freedom Army, the material or “objective” power of the enemy was irrelevant to their destinies. His machines, which flung metal missiles, his vessels of smoke, gas, fire, disease, all were of lesser relevance than the integral totality of the people themselves.11 When I was 15, I left a ghebbi in Addis Ababa and moved into a single-family home in a northern suburb of Atlanta. I joined my uncles, aunts, and two older siblings, all of whom had incrementally moved to Metro Atlanta sometime between 1988 and 1998, a period marked by terror and political turmoil in Ethiopia. My parents were the only ones who chose to stay. I often wonder what it means to be one of the ones who left. One of the ones who are privileged enough to look back and recall a set of experiences, on the other side of the Atlantic, as furtive ways to deal with the misery of exile. This lived experience has given me the clarity to debunk myths of separation between Blackness and Africa. Migrations across space and time, crossing the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, respond to the ubiquity of anti-Black violence shaping our planet’s past and present. Édouard Glissant describes this condition as “the open circle of our relayed aesthetics, our unflagging politics. We leave the matrix abyss and the immeasurable abyss for the other one in which we wander without becoming lost.”12 In Atlanta, the plantation economy spans from the dispossession of the Muscogee and Creek people to the construction of a “terminus” for crosscontinental railway lines. Maximizing the movement of settlers and resources while constraining that of Black and Indigenous people. The diagonal line of the train tracks became the footprint of highways that serve the same purpose. Black geographies practice immeasurability in the face of, and despite, the algorithmic enclosures of colonial cartography. These practices of dividing and ascribing value to land—“the racialized regime of ownership”—rely on the presence or removal of Black life.13 In settler colonial states like the United States, land occupied by Black and brown people is devalued. Then, suddenly, driven by the magnetic forces of whiteness, land starts to accrue value when the impending displacement of Black people is detected. This is why it is difficult to imagine a world after property, or to devise tactics that could disentangle architecture from property: racialized value systems are baked into the foundations of architecture and urban design. Disciplines invented to serve power are ill-equipped to render worlds inhabited by the dispossessed. When we started working on Reconstructions, the curators, participants, and the institution itself—the Museum of Modern Art of New York—knew that architecture could not survive a critical engagement with Black studies, because that would suggest a willingness to risk the autonomy embedded in the core tenets of

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FIGURE 7.3 Immeasurability,

Exhibition View, 2021 Photo by Naho Kubota

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the discipline: form and permanence. We started our experiments in image making by thinking of Blackness not as form but flow. A constant departure from the static, permanent, and legible precincts of property. How does one read or image how the weather of anti-Blackness morphs a Waffle House sign? How do images in popular culture help us read the forests of Atlanta as sites of fugitivity? The distinction between the pathologic and the paralogic, upon which our entire history turns, emerges here as well. Consider the subprime debtor as guerilla, establishing pockets of insurgent refuge and marronage, carrying revaluation and disruptively familial extensions into supposedly sanitized zones. . . ., beyond the critique of them and what they think, and what they try to do, toward the life we locate and imagine when the materiality of the subprime cuts the sublime by grounding its excess in the anarchic, historical materiality of our fleshly sociality. When we talk that talk, what we say must seem stupid to the regulators; the unbroken code of our enchanted, incantatory refreshment of paraontological totality—theorizing what it is to hold some land or what it is to let me hold 20 dollars—is so much undercomputational nonsense to the ones who cannot see the con/sensual, contrarational beauty of blackness, the universal machine. —Fred Moten14 Black spatiality offers fleeting performances that give new meaning to quotidian spaces. Immeasurability meditates on the slow and hardly discernable racialization of everyday spaces in Atlanta; chain restaurants, strip malls, and gas stations.15 We examined spatial practices that transform banal, repetitive spaces into portals for Black imagination. The potency of momentary escape allows us to notice the sublime within the ordinary. Unbuilding the spatial inheritances of racial slavery and colonialism can begin by theorizing and imaging the world we want to inhabit. These practices have to contend with dominant representations that obscure how space is racialized and how race is spatialized. I am attempting to read these spaces against the grain by documenting how they accrue meaning over time; how they are iteratively reimagined and reconfigured by racialized people. For liberty is that which the juridical structures of the liberal polity are said to protect, but only by ensuring that the citizenry preserve its property. In other words, the indistinction between liberty and property is the kernel of the liberal framework, that which accounts for the relay at work in the racial dialectic. —Denise Ferreira da Silva16 Most importantly, it is my attempt to reconnect with the openness of the ghebbi, knowing the impossibility of return. I  want to inhabit the sites of gathering

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I witnessed without laboring to justify their value. This is an initial attempt to think about the possibilities of spatially intonating Blackness. Notes 1 This title builds on Arthur Jafa’s concept of Black visual intonation (BVA). See Arthur Jafa, “Black Visual Intonation,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 265. 2 Elleni Centime Zeleke, Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 3 Ibid., 166. 4 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Currey, 1986), 4. 5 Ibid. 6 Saidiya Hartman, “A Room with History,” The Paris Review, January 9, 2023, www. theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01/09/a-room-with-history/. 7 For more on the Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition, see www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5219. 8 Sabine Höhler, “A  Sound Survey: The Technological Perception of Ocean Depth, 1850–1930,” Transforming Spaces. The Topological Turn in Technology Studies. Online Publication of the International Conference Held in Darmstadt, Germany, March 22–24, 2002 (2003, 2023). 9 Tina Marie Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 79–87. 10 Ibid. 11 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 12 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 203. 13 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 14 Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 244. 15 “Rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I  have chosen to look elsewhere and consider the scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned. . . . By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle.” See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 2–3. 16 Denise Da Silva, “Not Even by the Law Here,” in Unpayable Debt (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022), 80.

References Bhandar, Brenna. Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Campt, Tina Marie. “Black visuality and the practice of refusal.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019).

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Da Silva, Denise. “Not Even by the Law Here.” In Unpayable Debt. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022. Da Silva, Denise. Unpayable Debt. Berlin: Sternberg Press/The Antipolitical, 2022. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Hartman, Saidiya. “A Room with History.” The Paris Review, January 9, 2023. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022. Höhler, Sabine. “A  Sound Survey: The Technological Perception of Ocean Depth, 1850–1930.” Transforming Spaces. The Topological Turn in Technology Studies. Online Publication of the International Conference Held in Darmstadt, Germany, March 22–24, 2003. Jafa, Arthur. “Black Visual Intonation.” In The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, 265. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Moten, Fred. “The Subprime and the Beautiful.” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013). Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey, 1986. Zeleke, Elleni Centime. Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

8 WOVEN UNDERGROUND, CONFLICTING GROUND Luciana Varkulja

There is no denying the fact that Coney Island is an emblematic place fused with the distinctive culture of New York. Its famous role in culture has even caught the attention of well-known architects who have used its existence as a locus of argumentation for ideas of the world‘s capital, making a place for it in the architecture discourse. So much less is known about the material realities, even less of the origin of the elements used, not today, but a century ago that galvanized extractive material practices with yet unknown—now devastating consequences today. Architects and designers are still unaware of the larger impact of a project’s material and product specification. We look at those as a material catalog to choose from; we are disconnected from the environmental and human impact behind commodities’ extraction, and we lack knowledge of the supply chain. The story behind a built project is invisible, obscure. We do not see the impact of logging activities in the Amazon Rainforest, so the use of wood products does not seem that much of a problem. We do not see the predatory logging that happens in most of its territory, leading to the biome’s decline. We do not hear about the murders and armed conflicts that take place in the region. We have no idea that 90% of the wood used comes from illegal extraction.1 Forests are more than commodity producers; they are home to a network of complex relationships that affect and are affected by cities’ and the built environment (Figure 8.1). The Amazon Rainforest is a stage of major disputes and conflicting agendas. Data on land occupation and use collected by satellite images show conflicts in a region marked by violence and illegality: land grabbing, land conflicts, drugs, animal and human trafficking, deforestation. The Legal Amazon (Amazonia Legal) occupies 60% of Brazil’s national territory. Of the 29 million people who DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-11

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FIGURE 8.1 Gordon Matta-Clark, . . . A Forest is a Completely Woven Underground,

1970–1978. Black Felt-tip Pen. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Gift of Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

inhabit the region, 72% of the population lives in cities.2 About 440,000 are indigenous: there are isolated peoples, living on reservations and Indigenous Lands (or Terras Indígenas), some living outside the TIs, and those living in cities, being impacted by the region’s economic cycles from colonial times to the present day. Forests are places of territorial instability, which leads to food insecurity, connecting people with issues of deforestation, forest degradation, and illegal activities in the search for income increase. Understanding how cities affect forests could bring designers, stakeholders, the public, and users of ‘project destinations’ for forest products in cities more closely to restoration and food sovereignty strategies happening in forests’ extraction sites (Figure 8.2). A higher consumption demand affects the supply chain, promoting extraction increase, and consequently amplifying the region’s conflicts. We are damaging the welfare of forest communities to build our livable cities. Which strategies would help communities grow economically while

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preserving the forest, and integrating the voice of native peoples, harvesters, and small farmers? In cities, we tend to focus on the final built project; where materials come from, how they are extracted, and the ecological and human impacts of that activity is a hidden process. Cities’ consumption impacts the planet, with land and sea transport distances affecting materials’ embodied carbon. Processes behind material production— extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and installation—promote carbon emissions, and negative effects on the life and health of forest communities, but the human impacts are not variables included in the carbon equation calculation. Under the politics of carbon offsetting, corporations can compensate for carbon emissions through reforestation programs, but these newly planted forests can have similar land, environmental, and human impacts from other neocolonial extractive practices under the ‘green capitalism’ agenda. To bring the forest closer to the city through forest product storytelling—the ipê wood boardwalk—is to unveil the origin of this material while tracing and illustrating its trajectory together with the complex story of the characters and actors involved in that process, shedding light on the complexity of the social, political, environmental, and human conflicts present in this tropical rainforest from the Global South. Trades between Southern peripheries and Northern cores promote concentrating centers to grow richer and more ordered, while the periphery becomes more impoverished and degraded through that exchange. As designers, we focus on what happens at the construction site and the final building; instead, we can learn from the story of the ipê tree as a commodity, traveling back to its place of origin, unveiling the ecological and social impacts of its extraction. The Forest

Nicolas Vallard’s atlas from 1547 (Figure  8.3) illustrates Brazil’s coast, with Indigenous Peoples carrying logs on their shoulders. A native tree species that would inspire Brazil’s name, the pau-brasil (Paubrasilia echinata), was one of the first commodities to be exploited by the Portuguese invaders. Thousands of tons were extracted by enslaved Indigenous Peoples, who used the wood to color their cotton fibers. The extraction of this product was based on the natives’ knowledge of the forest and Europe’s high demand. The word pau-brasil—red as brasa, the Portuguese word for hot coal—was already used in trading. Brazil’s name came from a forest commodity. From 1501 onwards, 1,200 tons of pau-brasil were extracted per year. Together, European traders may have caused the extraction of 12,000 tons per year, with the use of thousands of Indigenous People in its exploitation. It is estimated that one ton required the felling of approximately 2 million trees.3

FIGURE 8.2 

Ipê (Handroanthus spp.) Extraction, 2021. Image by Uma Architecture  & Design With Monica Lamela’s Collaboration

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FIGURE 8.3 

 ortolan Atlas (the Vallard Atlas), 1547. HM 29, the Huntington P Library, San Marino, California

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Five hundred years later, with a value as high as USD 6,500 m3, ipê wood is the new gold. The tree occurs naturally at low densities—one individual every 10 ha—and is a slow-growing species. It has an average volume of 0,5 m3 per ha4 and the two species more consumed are the Handroanthus serratifolius and the Handroanthus impetiginosus. The ipê tree flowering attracts pollinators but also logging companies that use their blooming time to map trees in the forest to extract them later. Predatory exploitation, especially aimed at extracting valuable species, plays an important role in the dynamics of land use in the Amazon. Ipê (Handroanthus spp.) is today the target of these illegal operations. With high final prices for ipê products in international markets, there are strong incentives for the species to continue to be a catalyst for illegal logging in protected areas and in non-designated forests. Allied with its ecological characteristics and its fragility of regeneration in production forests, the increase in the intensity of exploitation of ipê can lead to its local disappearance in a relatively short period of time. The volume of logwood extracted more than doubled between 2007 and 2019, from 230,000 m3 to almost 500,000 m3. About 80% of the production of ipê logs in 2019 was concentrated in 20 production centers, with emphasis on Colniza (MT), Juruti (PA), Santarém (PA), Aripuanã (MT), and Prainha (PA).5 Such producing poles are located on the active exploration frontier logging, in the center of the Amazon, which suggests that the stocks of the species have already been exhausted in the regions along the southeastern edge of the forest that scientists and resource managers call the ‘Arc of Deforestation.’ The land is cleared for logging, cattle ranching, small-scale subsistence farming, and, increasingly, soybean production for world markets. Today in Brazil, there are 2,5 million ha of concessions under forest management plans with more restrictive rules. But there are flaws in the control and monitoring systems. To maintain ipê wood market demand, 16  million ha of managed forests would be necessary instead. In 2019, certified forests produced 36,000 m3 of processed wood, the equivalent of just 7% of the total production from that same year.6 In addition, the volumetric yield coefficient (CRV—coeficiente de rendimento volumétrico) per species shows that what is produced is lower than the mapped value, generating the accumulation of forest management plans’ virtual credits, which makes the control process ineffective and may favor the illegal log trade.7 Since the beginning of the 20th century, wooden boardwalks have been part of North America’s history and culture (Figure 8.4) and are built with high-value tropical hardwood extracted from the Amazonia Rainforest. The US is a top country on the list of hardwood consumption. American boardwalks are ‘project destinations’ for forest products and an example of a clear disconnect between forests and cities. Approximately 42 miles of the American wooden boardwalks are built in ipê wood. Documenting and tracing the intricate connections between cities’ projects and product extraction territories could unfold the (in)visible impacts that one has on the other. It has the potential to highlight the untold

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FIGURE 8.4 

 reamland Park, Coney Island, New York, c1905. Detroit PublishD ing Company Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-det-4a17572

story, about the American boardwalks and the Brazilian rainforest. The public— and boardwalks’ users—could critically reflect on the existing conflict scenarios triggered by the tropical hardwood extraction in the Amazonia territory, in contrast to the joyful scenes of dining, entertaining, and recreation happening along the high-traffic tourist areas of the boardwalks. The Boardwalk

Named after Brooklyn Borough President Edward J. Riegelmann, the Coney Island Boardwalk opened on May 15, 1923, and it was budgeted at $3 million (equivalent to $45  million today). Stretching from West 37th to Ocean Parkway, 3.6 million feet of timber was used in its construction (1.3 million wooden boards). In 1941, a renovation process took place to replace sections of the boardwalk with ipê wood. Ipê is well known for its outdoor resistance and strength; its natural properties make it a long-lasting decking material—it can last up to 75 years without preservatives and with minimal maintenance. The natural oils in the wood make it resistant to insects, especially termites. It is also naturally

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resistant to rot and decay, like mold and fungus. Ipê features a class A fire rating, which is the same rating as concrete and steel. It is a very desirable—and valuable—material with high demand in the international market. Used forest products in the US are drawn from across the globe. Data from the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) showed that 93% of sawn ipê wood imported by the US between 2008 and 2017 came from Brazil.8 In 2009, with the backing of then-Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, New York City planners began searching for materials that could replace the tropical hardwood of the boardwalk, which has been linked to rainforest decline. Community members were vocal to express that the replacement of the wood for any other material was unacceptable. Three years later, in October 2012, Hurricane Sandy—an event directly related to deforestation—resulted in extensive and severe flooding in New Jersey and New York: 72 people died; in Breezy Point, 126 homes burned down.9 Hospitals had to quickly evacuate patients; the city began rationing gas. President Barack Obama issued an executive order creating the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. Paradoxically, the material extraction of wood to make the boardwalk last longer is linked to the root cause of human and ecological impacts including forecasted sea level rise due to a changing climate effect of, among others, deforestation. Many East Coast boardwalks were destroyed. Several companies, businesses, and customers were eager to learn about—and compete for—the fate of the salvaged wood, a quite valuable material. Lumber removed from the Coney Island boardwalk has spread from East to West coasts and showed up as floors and furniture for projects including the Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia (about 6,000 feet of flooring), luxury residences in California, at a rooftop farm in Queens, and at a public pool in Brooklyn. A salvage material warehouse website sells Coney Island original ipê wood benches, ipê wood pens, and genuine ipê wood board blocks. From ipê salvaged wood to ipê wood souvenirs, what are the consequences of feeding tropical hardwood fetishism? In May 2018, the Coney Island Riegelmann Boardwalk became a Scenic Landmark, posting questions on its future material replacement. The Boardwalk and the Forest

The following table illustrates a scenario of predatory exploitation, which is caused by conventional logging, the type of extraction most practiced in Brazil. An ipê tree takes 80–100 years to grow (adult individual). It requires large areas of natural forest to thrive and only occurs in low densities despite market demand. These calculations do not consider any replacement of the product occurring after 25 or 30 years (Table 8.1). Conventional logging (Figure 8.5) promotes forest degradation issues when multiple secondary roads are illegally opened to access the trees. When one tree is harvested, it damages a whole number of other trees that surround it. With a

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American Boardwalks Using Ipê Wood (Handroanthus spp.) to Date. TABLE 8.1  Conventional Logging Measured Impact, 2021. Ongoing Research by Uma Architecture & Design

US Boardwalk

Extension (Mile/Kilometer)

Coney Island/Riegelmann Boardwalk, NY Greenport, NY Long Beach, NY Wildwood, NJ Asbury Park, NJ Avon-by-the-Sea, NJ Ventnor, NJ Ocean City, NJ Atlantic City, NJ Ocean Beach Park, CT Ocean City, MD Lake Buena Vista (Disney Boardwalk), FL Miami Beach, FL Audubon Society, FL Duluth, MN Long Beach, CA

2.7 miles (4.3 km) 2.2 miles (3.5 km) 4.3 miles (7 km) 3.3 miles (5.3 km) 13.1 total miles, 2.2 miles with ipê wood (3.5 km) 0.51 miles (0.8 km) 1.7 miles (2.7 km) 2.5 total miles, 0.6 miles with ipê wood (1 km) 4.0 miles (6.4 km) 0.5 miles (0.8 km) 2.6 miles (4.3 km) 0.25 miles (0.4 km) 4 miles (6.40 km) 2.25 miles (3.6 km) 7.5 miles (12 km) 3.1 miles (5 km)

Total Extensiona

42 miles (68 km)

Total area (m2/ft2) Total Sawn wood volume (m3)b Total Sawn wood volume (BF)c Total log volume required (m3)d Total area of managed forest (ha)e Total number of extracted treesf Total number of damaged treesg Open roads (km)h Total area of extracted forest canopy (km2)i

422,000 m2 (4,540,800 ft2) 10,720 m3 4,542,880 BF 794,100 m3 1,588,200 ha 160,000 trees 4,160,000 trees 8,480 km 5,400 km2

Total commercial wood valuej

$51,616,500,000

c d a

b

g h i j * e f

Approx. distance between NYC and New Canaan, CT Average area: 20 ft. wide by 42 miles long or ~227,040 ft. long Wood board as 1” thick (~0.0254 m thick) 1BF  ~0.002359737  m3 and volumetric yield coefficient (CRV, from the Portuguese coeficiente de rendimento volumétrico) for sawn wood at 35%. CRV is the index that establishes how much of the volume of round wood is transformed into sawn wood, without considering the residue or the use. Approx. 25% attend First Export Quality requirements (FEQ), or 9% of the log. However, to produce these decks, boards need to be greater than 7 ft. in length. 85% of the 25% are boards smaller than 7 ft.; 15% of the 25% are boards longer than 7 ft. (1.35% of the original log) 0.5 m3 per ha of commercial value per tree Density of 1 tree every 10 ha ~26 trees damaged per each logged tree * 53 m of open road per extracted tree * ~3,600 m2 of removed canopy per ha * $6,500 per m3 (2022) Numbers considering Conventional/Predatory Logging

Sources: INPA, Imazon, Imaflora, Rainforest Alliance, ITTO

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FIGURE 8.5 

Ipê wood (Handroanthus spp.) conventional logging and milling process: ecological and human impacts, 2021. Image by uma architecture & design with Angela Sun’s collaboration

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low number of individuals per hectare—1 ipê tree, every 10 ha—multiple areas of the forest are degraded. Forest degradation in Brazil is higher than deforestation, which compromises the biome’s biodiversity. There is also a conflict between the life cycle of the ipê tree and forest management plans. Experts say that the ipê tree needs 80–100  years to grow and recover, instead of the 30–35  years from the forest management plans. Nonupdated equipment contributes to the increase in waste amount. One ipê log is equivalent to 4 m3 of wood, but just 35% of the log is processed into lumber. Several variables influence sawmill performance, including the characteristics of the timber species being processed, the cutting machinery used, and the diameter and quality of the logs. Losses during tropical wood processing are high, and sawmills using advanced technology processing are not yet common in the Amazon. The considerable variation among the mean yields is due to the time of exposure of the logs to the weather in the log deck and the damage caused by wood-degrading insects, as well as the type of final product demanded.10 First Export Quality requirements (FEQ) and board design dimensions produce more waste—just 25% of the 35% that was processed into lumber is of export quality.11 Timber extraction also involves forced labor, conflicts, and land issues. Workers in illegal timber operations are vulnerable to unsafe working conditions without regulations due to their remote locations, the presence of organized crime, government corruption, and the lack of oversight and regulation. Forced labor in the timber industry is widespread. Supply chain investigations have shown that major retailers and construction groups in the US source timber through intermediaries whose logging practices involve the use of slave labor, as defined by Brazilian law. Brazil’s valuable ipê remains in demand despite this human rights violation, even though groups and organizations are flagging it. From 2011 to 2017, 880 workers were freed from forced labor in the timber industry.12 In Brazil, all transport and storage of native forest products and by-products must be registered within the DOF system (Document of Forestry Origin). This computerized platform supports control agencies in reducing the sale of illegal forest products, but existing gaps allow illegal wood to enter the system and be acquired as legal wood. There is a substantial inconsistency between the number of areas in the Amazon authorized for logging and the amount of wood produced. This indicates that a large amount of wood originates from unauthorized areas. The United States leads the consumption of Brazilian tropical hardwood. Data from IBAMA (the Environmental Agency from the Ministry of Environment in Brazil) refer to official exports, that is, wood that left Brazil legally. This does not mean, however, that the origin of all this wood is legal. Before an

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ipê slab arrives at the port to export, it travels through a chain that is invariably marked by corruption. The crime is basically based on a false documentation industry. With the involvement of public agents who act in a criminal way, documents are issued to ‘heat’ wood stolen from Indigenous Lands and conservation units. Thus, in practice, a country that imports wood from Brazil may even think that it is purchasing a 100% legal product, when its origin may be the result of a fraudulent scheme. According to the Brazilian Federal Police, the Brazilian timber market is historically marked by illegality. There are no precise figures on the scale of these criminal activities, but it is estimated that up to 90% of the timber that goes abroad is illegally extracted. Sustainable timber management has been used as a backdrop for illegal operations in the Amazon. According to the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil (INPE) and the PRODES Project—a project that carries out satellite monitoring of clear-cut deforestation in the Legal Amazon and produces, since 1988, annual deforestation rates in the region, used by the Brazilian government to establish public policies—deforestation reached 813,047 km² by 2020, or 16% of the total area of ​​the Legal Amazon.13 Vegetation cover in this region is distributed between native forest (63%) and non-forest native vegetation (19%). The rest of the area (2%) is made up of the hydrographic network of rivers and lakes. When considering only the native forest area of ​​the Amazon biome, deforestation reached almost 20% of the original native forest cover.14 But there is another highly degraded forest in Brazil—the Atlantic ­Rainforest—located on the coast of the country, where a high number of restoration processes are currently happening, and that could inspire potential strategies to be implemented soon in the Amazon biome if the pace of its destruction remains. From its original 129 M ha of native forest cover, studies estimate that in the Atlantic Forest, about 12,4% is left in a highly fragmented landscape, with 90% of those remnants being in private properties. Also, 149 million people live in the biome—which is 72% of Brazil’s population and it concentrates 70% of the country’s GDP.15 The current biome’s situation is a result of the direct ecological and social impacts of a series of economic cycles that were established in the region by the invaders and carried out with enslaved work throughout centuries. In the 20th century, the expansion of the coffee industry was one of the main historic drivers of deforestation in the region, together with logging. The coffee plantation, by using areas unsuitable for sugarcane crops such as mountainous regions, ended up contributing to the destruction of previously intact portions of the forest. That negative scenario accelerated because of the population increase and the growing predatory extractivism and monoculture

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practices, such as the eucalyptus plantations. In the 1960s, federal laws established tax incentives for eucalyptus reforestation—the planting of a single species tree (native or exotic) in large monoculture areas, aimed mainly at the production of wood, paper, or pulp. The program included cheap loans to the pulp companies through the government’s National Development Bank (BNDES). Because of these prime conditions, pulp operations are widespread in the region, with eucalyptus strains selected for their fast growth, requiring large amounts of water. Rivers have dried and the region has become semi-arid with Brazil’s southeast coastal states of Espírito Santo and Bahia rapidly heading towards desertification. Farmers complain about poor harvests; schools are often closed due to lack of water. The government has long been aware of the issue, but potential solutions are complex. According to a report,16 the production of 1.5 million tons of pulp requires 720,000 ha in Scandinavia and 300,000 ha in China, but only 140,000 ha in Brazil, attracting companies and investors to the activity. In addition, the trees are suitable for harvest after only seven years, roughly half of the time that they take to grow in Europe. Areas of native forest were replaced by large extensions of homogeneous plantations, which are constantly bombarded with pesticides. Communities and smaller farmers who live surrounded by those plantations have already denounced the situation countless times. The main companies operating in the region are certified by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), which is supposed to guarantee that the planted forest production is being developed in an economically, environmentally, and socially correct and fair way. Pulp companies keep applying for licenses to grow more hectares of eucalyptus, which are processed through small properties instead of a larger one, to avoid paying environmental compensation. They are pressuring land fragmentation and communities’ expulsion and promoting health impact through soil and water contamination. Lawsuits demand environmental impact studies and public hearings to assess the expansion of eucalyptus monoculture in the region, but no fines have been applied, and companies continue to operate. In the past 30 years, the number of croplands doubled, and monoculture tree plantations quadrupled. The predominant crops grown in the Atlantic Forest are sugarcane (~5.2 Mha), eucalyptus (~5.8 Mha), soybean, maize, and coffee (~14.4 Mha altogether), commodities produced in highly intensive and mechanized systems that rely mainly on flatter terrain, pushing deforestation to those areas (Figure 8.6). Economic cycles still have a large impact in the region. Restoration initiatives must involve Indigenous populations and other forest peoples—caiçaras, ribeirinhos, and quilombolas (local, traditional, rural communities)—who have long warned of the devastation caused by the production and consumption of contemporary societies. Studies show17

FIGURE 8.6 In the past 30 years, croplands doubled, and monoculture tree plantations

quadrupled. The predominant crops grown in the Atlantic Forest—sugarcane (~5.2 Mha), eucalyptus (~5.8 Mha), soybean, maize, and coffee (~14.4 Mha all together)—are commodities produced in highly intensive and mechanized systems that rely mainly on flatter terrain, pushing deforestation to those areas. Image by uma architecture & design

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that in the regions these communities inhabit, they are primarily responsible for preserving, recovering, and protecting biomes against predatory exploitation, including the few remnants of the Atlantic Forest. Indigenous Land is degrading less quickly—at a slower rate—than in other areas. In Brazil, Indigenous Lands occupy an area of ​​117 M ha, almost 14% of the Brazilian territory.18 The world should draw lessons from those communities’ environmental stewardship.

FIGURE 8.7 

 uarani Mbya, Tenondé Porã Indigenous Land, Atlantic Forest. São G Paulo, SP, 2022. Image by uma architecture & design with Nastassja Lafontant’s collaboration

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Understanding the context, the challenges currently faced by these communities and the efforts made to overcome those obstacles is essential, as much as to trace past and present conflicts—social, environmental, political, and economic—that challenge territories, cultural heritage, and health. Indigenous groups and local communities’ leadership recognize the importance to connect traditional knowledge with scientists’ and academics’ skills for a successful outcome. All sources of knowledge are equally valuable; they help create conservation and restoration initiatives that protect ecosystems and biomes while implementing community-led opportunities that have the power to support them economically. Scientists and policymakers must partner with those communities to seize biodiversity loss. Forests are, ultimately, designed projects with a variety of patterns, which reflect social and economic cycles and have an ecological impact. From the forest’s original formation, passing through deforestation, cultivation, soil degradation, and restoration, which are the potential patterns that combine strategies to aid communities economically while restoring and preserving the forest could be implemented? What if we look at the people who planted part of the forest, and their ancestors and learn from them? The forest finds support for its recovery in these communities, which develop their way of living in parallel with environmental conservation. They preserve, restore, and protect the biome against predatory exploitation, through ­agroforestry-based approaches, combining trees with traditional food crops. The Guarani Mbya have inhabited the Atlantic Forest for thousands of years (Figure 8.7). Their collective way of living—nhandereko—implies the relationship and management of the forest in balance with nature and consequently supports the development of long-term carbon sinks. We must interweave material knowledge with regenerative farming practices, which have the potential to reverse forest degradation and deforestation (Figure 8.8). But there are important obstacles to that: unequal land distribution and access, and unsustainable industrial agriculture supported by the global chain. Land reform requires the involvement of public and private organizations, including changes in legislation, due diligence efforts, and surveillance policies. Instead of continuously seeing forests as a distant world from the act of drawing, building, and material selection, could we develop our sense of awareness and potentially connect design projects to restoration initiatives that are already happening in those extraction sites? A multidisciplinary approach and partnership with local communities and professionals in the biology, agronomy, sustainable economics, agrarian policies, and legislation fields are mandatory, in favor of the development of inclusive strategies that reduce the social and economic abysses of the current system.

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FIGURE 8.8 

ekoa Kalipety mapping, Tenondé Porã Indigenous Land, Atlantic T Forest. São Paulo, SP, 2022

Source: Google Earth. Image by uma architecture & design with Nastassja Lafontant’s collaboration

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Notes 1 Greenpeace Brazil and the Tropical Forestry Laboratory of Esalq/USP, Imaginary Trees, Real Destruction. 2 See Imazon and Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), Amazônia 2030. 3 W. Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995). 4 See M. Lentini et al., A exploração do ipê (Handroanthus spp.) em florestas naturais da Amazônia brasileira: desafios e oportunidades para a conservação e o manejo responsável (Imaflora, 2021). www.imaflora.org/public/media/biblioteca/boletim_ timberflow_junho_2021_240621.pdf. 5 M. Lentini et  al., A exploração do ipê (Handroanthus spp.) em florestas naturais da Amazônia brasileira: desafios e oportunidades para a conservação e o manejo responsável (Imaflora, 2021). www.imaflora.org/public/media/biblioteca/boletim_ timberflow_junho_2021_240621.pdf. 6 Ibid. 7 K. D. C. Andrade, et  al., Volumetric Yield Coefficient: The Key to Regulating Virtual Credits for Amazon Wood (Acta Amazonica, 2022), www.scielo.br/j/aa/a/ LNWngxngDqpYgznkmXzQqfw/. 8 See A. Abreu, L. F. Toledo, and E. Goulart, How Endangered Brazilian Timber Ends Up in the US (OCCRP, 2022), www.occrp.org/en/investigations/how-endangeredbrazilian-timber-ends-up-in-the-us. 9 Hu W and McGeehan P (2022). A Timeline of Hurricane Sandy. From a single wave off the coast of Africa to a $52 billion sea wall a decade later. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-timeline.html Accessed Aug 2023. 10 K. D. C. Andrade, et  al., Volumetric Yield Coefficient: The Key to Regulating Virtual Credits for Amazon Wood (Acta Amazonica, 2022), www.scielo.br/j/aa/a/ LNWngxngDqpYgznkmXzQqfw/. 11 T. Keating, Deep Impact: An Estimate of Tropical Rainforest Acres Impacted for a Board Foot of Imported Ipê (Rainforest Relief, 1998), www.rainforestrelief.org/­ documents/Deep_Impact_2.pdf. 12 See University of Nottingham, et al., Timber Industry: Modern Slavery and the British Market (Repórter Brasil, 2018), https://media.business-humanrights.org/media/ documents/files/documents/Timber_2018.pdf. 13 Inpe, PRODES—Amazônia, Monitoramento do Desmatamento da Floresta Amazônica Brasileira por Satélite, 2022, www.obt.inpe.br/OBT/assuntos/programas/ amazonia/prodes 14 See Imazon and Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), Amazônia 2030. 15 Imazon, et  al., Observatório da Restauração e do Reflorestamento, https://observa toriodarestauracao.org.br/dashboard. 16 See I. Amigo, Pressure Over Water in Brazil Puts Pulp Industry in the Spotlight. Mongabay Series: Global Forests, https://news.mongabay.com/2017/03/pressureover-water-in-brazil-puts-pulp-industry-in-the-spotlight/. 17 H. N. Alves-Pinto, et al., “The Role of Different Governance Regimes in Reducing Native Vegetation Conversion and Promoting Regrowth in the Brazilian Amazon,” Science Direct, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000632072200026X. 18 H. Marcelo Souza and D Garcia, Povos indígenas são essenciais para conservação e bioeconomia da floresta (Revista Galileu, 2021), https://revistagalileu.globo.com/ Ciencia/Meio-Ambiente/noticia/2021/04/povos-indigenas-sao-essenciais-para-­ conservacao-e-bioeconomia-da-floresta.html.

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References Abramovay, R. Amazônia: por uma economia do conhecimento da natureza. São Paulo: Elefante, 2019. Abramovay, R. Muito além da economia verde. São Paulo: Editora Abril. 2012. Abreu, A., L. F. Toledo, and E. Goulart. How Endangered Brazilian Timber Ends Up in the US. OCCRP, 2022. Accessed May  2023. www.occrp.org/en/investigations/ how-endangered-brazilian-timber-ends-up-in-the-us. Alves-Pinto, H. N., C. L. O. Cordeiro, J. Geldmann, H. D. Jonas, M. P. Gaiarsa, A. Balmford, J. E. M. Watson, A. E. Latawiec, and B. Strassburg. The Role of Different Governance Regimes in Reducing Native Vegetation Conversion and Promoting Regrowth in the Brazilian Amazon. Science Direct, 2022. Accessed October  2022. www.­sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000632072200026X. Amigo, I. Deforestation in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest Increased Almost 60 Percent in the Last Year. Mongabay Series: Global Forests. 2017. Accessed April  2022. https://news.mongabay.com/2017/06/deforestation-in-the-brazilian-atlantic-forestincreased-almost-60-percent-in-the-last-year/. Amigo, I. In Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, Conservation Efforts Drown in a Sea of ­Eucalyptus. Mongabay Series: Global Forests. 2017. Accessed April  2022. https:// news.mongabay.com/2017/04/in-brazils-atlantic-forest-conservation-efforts-drownin-a-sea-of-eucalyptus/. Amigo, I. Pressure Over Water in Brazil Puts Pulp Industry in the Spotlight. Mongabay Series: Global Forests. 2017. Accessed March  2022. https://news.mongabay. com/2017/03/pressure-over-water-in-brazil-puts-pulp-industry-in-the-spotlight/. Andrade, K. D. C., A. P. F. Santos, F. Emmert, J. Santos, A. J. N. Lima, and N. Niguchi. Volumetric Yield Coefficient: The Key to Regulating Virtual Credits for Amazon Wood. Acta Amazonica. 2022. Accessed May  2023. www.scielo.br/j/aa/a/ LNWngxngDqpYgznkmXzQqfw/. Aparecido, E., T. Matricardi, D. Skole, C. O. Bueno, M. A. Pedlowski, J. H. Samek, and E. P. Miguel. “Long-term Forest Degradation Surpasses Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.” Science (2020). Accessed October 2022. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/ science.abb3021. Barber, D. The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2014. Barros, A. C., and A. Veríssimo. A Expansão Madeireira na Amazônia: Impactos e perspectivas para o desenvolvimento sustentável no Pará. Imazon, 2002. Accessed May 2023. https://imazon.org.br/PDFimazon/Portugues/livros/a-expansao-madeireirana-amazonia-impactos-e.pdf. Brancalion, P. H. S., D. R. A. de Almeida, E. Vidal, P. G. Molin, V. E. Sontag, S. E. X. F. Souza, and M. D. Schulze. “Fake Legal Logging in the Brazilian Amazon.” Science Advances (2018). Accessed May 2023. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aat1192. Brandford, S. “Suzano alega que suas plantações de eucalipto são sustentáveis; ambientalistas discordam.” Mongabay, 2022. Accessed June 2022. https://brasil.mongabay. com/2022/01/suzano-alega-que-suas-plantacoes-de-eucalipto-sao-sustentaveis-ambientalistas-discordam/. Brannstrom, C. “A ferro e fogo, história ambiental e a geografia brasileira: um diálogo por inventar.” Revista Brasileira de Geografia 61, no. 1 (2016): 109–25.

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Dean, W. “Review: Joe Foweraker, the Struggle for Land.” American Historical Review 89, no. 4 (1984). Dean, W. With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Ennes, J. “Land Conflicts in Brazil Break Record Under Bolsonaro.” Mongabay (2021). Accessed April 2022. https://news.mongabay.com/2021/06/land-conflicts-in-brazilbreak-record-in-2020-under-bolsonaro/. Greenpeace Brazil. The Amazon’s Silent Crisis. 2014. Accessed April  2022. www.­ greenpeace.org/usa/research/logging-the-amazons-silent-crisis/. Greenpeace Brazil and the Tropical Forestry Laboratory of Esalq/USP. Imaginary Trees, Real Destruction. 2018. Accessed April  2022. www.greenpeace.org/international/ publication/15432/imaginary-trees-real-destruction/. Holmes, T. P., G. M. Blate, J. C. Zweede, R. Jr Pereira, P. Barreto, F. Boltz, and R. Bauch. Financial and Ecological Indicators of Reduced Impact Logging Performance in the Eastern Amazon. Forest Ecology and Management. Elsevier, 2002. Accessed April 2022. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378112701005308. Hu W and McGeehan P (2022). A Timeline of Hurricane Sandy. From a single wave off the coast of Africa to a $52 billion sea wall a decade later. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-timeline.html. Accessed Aug 2023. Hutton, J., et al., eds. Material Culture: Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes. Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH., 2017. Hutton, J., et al. Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. Imazon, Climate Policy Initiative (CPI). Amazônia 2030. 2021. Accessed May  2023. https://amazonia2030.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/AMZ2030-Fatos-da-­ Amazonia-2021–3.pdf. Imazon, Pacto Pela Restauração da Mata Atlântica, Coalizão Brasil Clima Florestas e Agricultura. Observatório da Restauração e do Reflorestamento. 2022. Accessed May 2023. https://observatoriodarestauracao.org.br/dashboard. Inpe, PRODES—Amazônia. Monitoramento do Desmatamento da Floresta Amazônica Brasileira por Satélite. 2022. Accessed May 2023. www.obt.inpe.br/OBT/assuntos/ programas/amazonia/prodes. Keating, T. Deep Impact: An Estimate of Tropical Rainforest Acres Impacted for a Board Foot of Imported Ipê. Rainforest Relief, 1998. Accessed May  2023. www.­ rainforestrelief.org/documents/Deep_Impact_2.pdf. Krenak, A. Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019. Lentini, M., T. Carvalho, F. Nunes, and F. Cerignoni. A exploração do ipê (Handroanthus spp.) em florestas naturais da Amazônia brasileira: desafios e oportunidades para a conservação e o manejo responsável. Imaflora, 2021. Accessed May 2023. www. imaflora.org/public/media/biblioteca/boletim_timberflow_junho_2021_240621.pdf. Lentini, M., J. C. Zweede, and T. P. Holmes. Case Studies on Measuring and Assessing Forest Degradation. Measuring Ecological Impacts from Logging in Natural Forests of the Eastern Amazonia as a Tool to Assess Forest Degradation. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), 2009. Accessed May  2023. www.fao.org/3/k7177e/ k7177e00.pdf. MapBiomas. Relatório Anual do Desmatamento no Brasil 2021. 2022. Accessed May  2023. https://s3.amazonaws.com/alerta.mapbiomas.org/rad2021/RAD2021_ Completo_FINAL_Rev1.pdf.

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Marcelo Souza, H., and D. Garcia. Povos indígenas são essenciais para conservação e bioeconomia da floresta. Revista Galileu, 2021. Accessed May 2023. https://revista galileu.globo.com/Ciencia/Meio-Ambiente/noticia/2021/04/povos-indigenas-saoessenciais-para-conservacao-e-bioeconomia-da-floresta.html. Marengo, J. A., and C. Jr Souza. Mudanças climáticas: impactos e cenários para a Amazônia. Instituto Socioambiental, Greenpeace, Alana and Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil. 2018. Accessed May 2023. www.oamanhaehoje.com.br/assets/ pdf/Relatorio_Mudancas_Climaticas-Amazonia.pdf. Miller, S. W. Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil’s Timber. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. New York City’s Iconic Coney Island Boardwalk Becomes a Designated Landmark. 2018. Accessed May  2023. www.nyc.gov/ site/lpc/about/pr2018/051518.page. Piffer, P. R., M. R. Rosa, L. R. Tambosi, J. P. Metzger, and M. Uriarte. “Turnover Rates of Regenerated Forests Challenge Restoration Efforts in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.” Environmental Research Letters 17, no. 4 (2022). https://iopscience.iop.org/ article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac5ae1. Rosa, M. R., P. H. S. Brancalion, R. Crouzeilles, L. R. Tambosi, L. R. Piffer, F. E. B. Lenti, M. Hirota, E. Santiami, and J. P. Metzger. “Hidden Destruction of Older Forests Threatens Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and Challenges Restoration Programs.” Science Advances, 2021. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abc4547. Sassen, S. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Sax, S. With Plantation Takeover, Brazil’s Indigenous Pataxó Move to Reclaim Their Land. Mongabay Series: Indigenous Peoples and Conservation, 2022. Accessed July 2022. https://news.mongabay.com/2022/07/with-plantation-takeover-brazils-indigenouspataxo-move-to-reclaim-their-land/. Schulze, M., J. Groganb, C. Uhle, M. Lentini, and E. Vidal. Evaluating ipe (Tabebuia, Bignoniaceae) Logging in Amazonia: Sustainable Management or Catalyst for Forest Degradation? 2008. Accessed May  2023. www.researchgate.net/publica tion/222407694_Evaluating_ip_Tabebuia_Bignoniaceae_logging_in_Amazonia_ Sustainable_management_or_catalyst_for_forest_degradation. University of Nottingham, BRICS Policy Centre, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, Repórter Brasil and Core Coalition. Timber Industry: Modern Slavery and the British Market. Repórter Brasil, 2018. Accessed May  2023. https://media.businesshumanrights.org/media/documents/files/documents/Timber_2018.pdf.

9 UNEARTHING AND REVERSING Exhausting the Water Cycle Linda Schilling Cuellar

A Long and Narrow Country at the Edge

A long and narrow country at the edge of the South American tectonic plate, Chile stands out to visitors by its 4,300 km length, separating the Atacama—the driest desert in the world—from the prized so-called virgin lands in Patagonia. Usually ignored is its narrowest point of 95 km between mountains and sea near Illapel. At this point, the water reserves from the Andes quickly find their way to the Pacific Ocean through a network of tributaries that allow rivers to reach the sea. However, not all rivers meet the sea in Chile. In the north, some of them trick the eye and drain inland, like the Atacama salt flat, an endorheic basin that, by this entrapment, nursed 15% of the world’s lithium reserves and is home to a delicate ecosystem of microscopic bacterial life that we are just now able to visualize and protect. This remarkable geographical feature, its narrowness, sets the stage for a hydrological cycle where the various parties who benefit from it fight to allocate as much of the water as possible in an inventory of 101 basins. This narrowness, seen before as a competitive feature for many industries as it placed extracted resources quickly on cargo ships to reach international routes, also works as a caveat for the same private interests that have engineered their way into resource depletion. Subsistence farmers and fisherman have seen their livelihoods drastically changed by the presence of large mining companies that claim Miner’s Water rights to rivers nascent that drastically alter downstream ecologies. In addition, agricultural and industrial farming has intervened in the water cycle through infrastructures like dams, ditches, and pipes. Mining is reversing the water cycle by developing desalination plants to tap into the “endless” resource of water DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-12

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from the Pacific Ocean. Like other geographies, water—in all its forms—is at the center of control over nature. Water is in Chile a clear example of what has been referred to as the “gluttony of having so much,” so much horizon, so much landscape.1 Water Rights or the Right to Water

The 1980 Constitution established a Water Code that allowed the creation of a water market to trade water rights—it privatized water as a resource. Anyone who had rights up to this point saw monetary wealth created out of thin air under the pretext of incentivizing better management. No one could contest a technocratic policy, for technology remains synonymous with unbiased. Soon, this new legal framework became a hydrological force on its own. The water market was a game changer for Chilean legislation and the emerging entrepreneurship class. Even though some held customary water uses, the new proprietary nature triggered a reconfiguration of basins through a discrete infrastructure of pumps, pools, and ditches. This infrastructural layout makes it challenging to determine when someone is drawing more water than allocated or diverting without a permit, which many do. Human consumption and sanitation had no priority before commercial and industrial uses, and water could sell to be consumed elsewhere in the same watershed. In the Petorca Valley in Chile’s central region, for example, subsistence farming begins a steady decline in favor of agribusiness that can afford water rights and withstand long legal battles against communities and their customary rights. With a new legal framework, the 1980s saw in an expanding Israeli technology from the 1960s, drip irrigation, the technology to source wealth from agriculture beyond what they had before,2 especially when implemented on cheap hillside land composed mainly of eroded slopes, which later became covered with plantations, including avocados, to satisfy a global market’s appetite. Academia became a partner in these ventures studying the effectiveness of grid spacing and the efficacy of growth hormones setting aside ecological considerations related to land exhaustion and water depletion. As Francisco Gardiazabal Irazabal, a prominent academic in these matters credited with developing the avocado industry in Chile, wrote in the California Avocado Society 2001 yearbook: For many years, soil topography was an impediment to the establishment of fruit crops orchards. Nowadays, with modern irrigation systems, it is feasible to produce under these conditions. Irrigation has made it possible to incorporate low productivity lands into commercial horticulture.3 Despite growing concerns regarding environmental distortions and increasing demand for active environmental stewardship, knowledge production was at the

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service of the interest of the growers, not the ecosystem. The case can be made that this remains the same for other industries based on resource extraction. Javiera Barandiarán has extensively studied the Environmental Impact Assessment System in Chile.4 Her work traces the lack of efficacy to key socio-environmental misreadings and the lack of unbiased information on behalf of the State about its territory. The same State would later buy information from a knowledge market made of private consultants whose interests overstep the public to fulfill whichever enterprise they produce knowledge for.5 Therefore little is known about the remaining water in aquifers or its distribution. The complex web of parties involved and overlapping government agencies’ jurisprudence makes keeping track of water withdrawal and assigning accountability difficult, if not impossible. As recently as April 2022, Congress passed a long-awaited Water Code reform requiring mining companies to disclose water usage obtained through their Miner’s Water rights.6 The reform aims to update the State’s inventory and gives them the authority to revoke rights in cases where extraction affects the sustainability of the aquifer or the rights of third parties. With a water scarcity problem, some have taken to the ocean for water. Desalination as the New Frontier

July 12, 2021, during a televised presidential primary amongst right-wing candidates, to the question: Who should own water rights in Chile?, one of the candidates maneuvered an answer that introduced desalination as the new frontier for the country’s water needs, mentioning as evidence that 85% of the city of Antofagasta—a complex city known for its mining based economy, exponential growth, and immigration problems—already relies on desalinated water, therefore a perfect example of the unexplored possibilities that lie ahead. The answer went uncontested by his opponents, and the journalists conducting the debate saw no issue with the solutionist framing. No mention of the energy and resources needed to reverse the water cycle, its impacts on coastal ecosystems, or long-term human health issues, let alone that most are privately owned. Promoting entrepreneurship as the only thing standing in the way of engineering our way out of scarcity is a prevalent argument. However, as academia raises the alarm about establishing temporary techno-fixes as permanent solutions by running cost-efficiency analyses that neglect to assess the core issue of mismanagement, government and industry have gone about it as if it were business as usual until something unusual happens.7 On the morning of August 15, 2022, Playa Amarilla, a beach right in front of a Ramsar-protected wetland, Laguna Conchalí, became the site of a stranded jackup platform installed for the execution of the maritime works necessary for the final positioning of the seawater intake and brine discharge pipelines in Los Vilos Bay. These pipes belong to the off-shore works of a desalination plant located in

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Puerto Chungo—a port that Minera Los Pelambres (MLP) uses to ship copper concentrate out of the coastal town of Los Vilos, in the region of Coquimbo. The jack-up platform—sometimes referred to as the widow-maker—sits on the beach like a defeated, tilted four-stories Leviathan. Tons of debris reached the beach, which port workers swiftly cleaned up. Though the most crucial parts of the machine wreckage, a 180-meters tall crane and containers with 1,440 liters of diesel and another with 470 liters of vegetable oil, remain out of sight. They sit on the sea floor under the blanket of tides hiding the disaster from the prying eyes of locals that took to the beach to see such a spectacle. The sight of the stranded desalination jack-up platform reminded everyone that the crane had also fallen off before but had made less of an impact since it never reached the shore. Before Puerto Chungo’s facilities, the Laguna Conchalí wetland dominated the local’s imagination as a place without the fence enclosure for rabbit hunting, fishing, foraging, and recreational bathing. Locals had contested the protocols where humans are restricted access to sites that, after the Ramsar designation, they express sadness and nostalgia for a time when the wetlands were part of their lives. In that earlier time, hunting and fishing were a communal subsistence activity, where the catch was distributed amongst everyone, and no land ownership stood in the way—today it is not uncommon to find signage persuading people from hunting.8 Still, these practices can be seen in the afternoon at the fishermen’s wharf, where old and young, men and women, locals, or curious visitors, engage in fishing. If the catch is too young, they return it to the ocean. If they catch too many, they share it with elderly neighbors who no longer make the walk to the wharf. Now the fenced wetland gives way to the ocean industrial skyline. Industrial installations are more common than fisherman boats nowadays since they have no incentive to fish anymore, given the monthly compensation they receive from the mine. Even though jack-up platforms are known for being responsible for human casualties, and the washed-up platform had experienced its signature crane falling off a year earlier, nowhere in the environmental impact study did the company acknowledge any possible auxiliary platform failure related to the construction phase of the desalination intake and discharge pipes. Instead, the environmental impact study (Evaluación de Impacto Ambiental, EIA) listed the visual impacts in a low to moderate range based on the already disturbed horizon of previous company installations. All installations are theirs and were approved by the system of environmental impact assessment (Sistema de Evaluación de Impacto, Ambiental, SEIA)—a blue conveyor belt and warehouse that dominates the bay. Therefore, the bay is a real estate arena where impacts are felt the most by creatures who can hardly file a complaint against their disturbed environment. Adjacent to these maritime infrastructures lay benthonic resources management areas (Áreas de Manejo y Explotación de

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FIGURE 9.1 Playa

Amarilla Beach on the Afternoon of August  16, 2022. On the Right, Clean-up Efforts. On the Left, the Stranded Auxiliary Platform From the Desalination Intake Point. Photo Linda Schilling Cuellar

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FIGURE 9.2 Laguna

Conchalí Wetland Fenced. Photo Linda Schilling Cuellar

Recursos Bentónicos AMERB), critical areas for nurseries that foster species to repopulate the bay with a catch that sells well in restaurants. A local fisherman described their work as vital: we do not extract; we take care of the bay for the right of future generations to make a living from the same ocean we did before.9 Rather than distract the public with debates about the nature of environmental change, this shift would focus attention on questions like, what did past EIAs for a similar project get wrong, and with what environmental consequences? What will be different this time? This kind of analysis would expose past mistakes, misguided promises, and system failures and foster a healthy questioning of the power of environmental science to control industrial impacts.10 Other desalination plants have received approval for construction. None of them envision what happened at Playa Amarilla as a risk they must account for when introducing their EIAs to the national agency. There are 24 plants in operation, with 22 set to operate in the following years and only a few for human consumption; most of them are for the sole purpose of extending mineral extraction operations, which become more complex and water-intensive as ore veins exhaust. With facilities on land and in the ocean, these new water infrastructures open a new discussion about how far the industry will continue without awareness of the interactions set in motion with unintended environmental consequences. Some new desalination projects go as far as to describe their operations as sustainable, safe, and a permanent option to face the lack of freshwater with

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FIGURE 9.3 Playa Amarilla Beach on the Afternoon of August 16, 2022. In the Fore-

ground: the Stranded Auxiliary Platform From the Desalination Intake Point. In the Background: Puerto Chungo facilities, to the Right the Conveyor Belt, and to the Left the Warehouse for Copper Concentrate. Photo Linda Schilling Cuellar

FIGURE 9.4 Satellite

Image With the Locations of Important Landmarks in the City of Los Vilos

non-continental water. They offer a paradigm shift; instead of adjusting to water scarcity brought by climate change—not crisis—they propose to look towards the ocean as a solution. Insisting on framing everything as a problem is an example of what Rob Holmes describes as landscape solutionism: a desperate

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effort to see everything as a problem for which a solution—often found in engineering—can be offered. The weapon of choice remains a twentieth-century drive to engineer a way out of things.11 Environmental Violence

The entrepreneurial aspect of desalination is in no way seen as environmental violence, even though signs are everywhere. On that Monday morning, August 15, the wetland footpath was the site of a sitting from residents of the informal settlement Alto Los Vilos to ensure that the presidential delegate who came to see the stranded auxiliary platform at Playa Amarilla heard their request for land access. The delegate, who headed to Los Vilos for an entirely different reason, had to concede an audience. As a sign of good faith, the delegate sent water trucks to provide fresh water to more than 400 families that do not have water or sewage infrastructure and resort to gas stations nearby to access sanitary facilities. Alto Los Vilos sits on a small hill between Route 5—better known as the Pan-American Highway—and the Los Pelambres evapotranspiration zone. The evapotranspiration zone consists of a 140-hectare eucalyptus plantation employed to dispose of residual industrial processes water—that entered contact with chemicals to strip copper from copper ore—back to the atmosphere via evaporation and transpiration through the root and foliage system of these trees. As acknowledged by the mine’s closure plans filed to the National Geology and Mining Service (Servicio Nacional de Geología y Minería, SERNAGEOMIN), the site is an environmental liability due to the water-carrying sulfates accumulated in the tree trunks and the soil. After two decades of a co-opted nature-based solution, the eucalyptus plantation poses a slow threat to families from the Alto Los Vilos settlement that decide to draw water from the ground within the confines of their 20 by 15 meters plot of land. A resident of Alto Los Vilos sector 6 indicated that no one knows the risks of drawing water but would, regardless of the long-term risk, do so because they need to address their water needs now, not in the future. Furthermore, these groups illegally occupy land because of a housing shortage due to the demand generated by the mine’s subcontracted workers that priced them out of the city, an externality not considered in the many EIA’s MLP has filed throughout two decades. Their choice of location is nothing short of strategic since they can exert pressure on MLP executives forcing the municipal government to hear their demands. Inside the evapotranspiration zone is a landing strip that allows high-ranking MLP employees to fly over environmentalist road blockades at the mine’s facilities up in the Andes mountains, and head to Santiago via Route 5, effectively bypassing demonstrators, turning a blind eye to the impact their decisions have on the environment. Their leverage concerning location is nothing but a sign of how important they consider the mining

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FIGURE 9.5 Alto

Los Vilos Informal Settlement. Sector 6 Plots and Construction Materials. August 2022. Photo Linda Schilling Cuellar

company to be—even going as far as demanding the mine resolve their housing situation and compensate them as they have with other communities along the valley. The same company that 23 years ago triggered a landscape transformation to extract and ship copper concentrate from the Andes through the Pacific Ocean is both the savior and the world-destroyer for residents of the series of towns the mine cuts across. Locals have come to rely on private companies when the State apparatus does not have the resources to reach remote communities nor demand environmental accountability because it does not have reliable data to assess extractive industries’ impacts on the ecosystem. From Unearthing to Reversing

MLP is a perfect case study to understand the consequences of twentieth-­century ingenuity on the landscape. It started with unearthing materials, unleashing unintended disturbances when entering contact with matter above ground. The blasting of mountains in areas with rock glaciers—important freshwater reservoirs for aquifers—the flooding of valleys with mine tailings leaching into streams below, and the capture of surface water from rivers, the extractive machine knows no boundaries. Now the challenge of unearthing matter gives way to reversing the water cycle to secure more of the resource that unearthing made scarce. Against all odds, the drive is to push against a path that presents substantial resistance. This resistance is a call answered only by a few with the resources to carry out

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FIGURE 9.6 Satellite

Image With the Locations of MLP Operation Sites

enormous investments backed up by private equity seeking to develop a portfolio of environmental projects for low-carbon futures.12 This portfolio has fertile terrain in Global South countries that rely on private investment to advance infrastructural projects and project economic stability to the world at the cost of environmental degradation. Unearthing has a history of lacking environmental accountability. Mining’s track record of socio-environmental conflicts dates to the fumes inhaled by indigenous people in the silver mine of Potosí during the sixteenth century. In his famed book, The Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano writes of forced/mandatory labor for the Inca empire known as “mita”: The mita labor system was a machine for crushing Indians (sic). The process of using mercury to extract silver poisoned as many or more than did the toxic gases in the bowels of the earth. It made hair and teeth fall out and brought on uncontrollable trembling. The victims ended up dragging themselves through the streets pleading for alms. At night 6,000 fires burned on the slopes of the Cerro and in these the silver was worked, taking advantage of the wind that the “glorious Saint Augustine” sent from the sky. Because of the smoke from the ovens there were no pastures or crops for a radius of twenty miles around Potosi and the fumes attacked men’s bodies no less relentlessly.13 Half a millennia of unearthing matter in America for capital accumulation in Europe—in a similar way every time throughout history—has allowed seeing this dispossession as a familiar and barely contested framework. Unearthing matter, displacing matter, or matter out-of-place as the British anthropologist

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Mary Douglas posited dirt, renders pollution as relational,14 and therefore makes contamination a spatial concept. In Baselining Nature, the sociologist Sebastián Ureta looks at the impact the framework around pollution has had on the development of public policy like environmental impact assessments and offers a critique around how do we measure or assess where something should be, inviting us to think about baselines which are understood as the ‘natural’ or ‘historical’ state of a species population or ecosystem, not as a fixed demarcation against which to measure something and survey change, but as a set of practices that render relations and interdependencies between different stakeholders visible: baselining.15 Baselining has become a critical practice since the accelerated change brought by the climate crisis. The active surveying of our changing landscape is crucial to communities at the forefront of areas in which socio-­environmental conflict takes place. Their lack of knowledge and absence of reliable data is the foundation of their limited capacity to contest what happens in their land, and the key to sustaining a co-existence with other entities for whom the world, a world, is also changing. In this tale of matter out-of-place, someone/someplace will have to be sacrificed for a greater good, a moral compass set by the oppressor wanting to extract wealth, never the moral compass of the oppressed. This compass goes unchallenged under the premise that operating in this fashion is inevitable. To consider reparations local communities must receive, or even if such sacrifices are necessary, is only now a topic of discussion. Cristina Dorador, a constitutional assembly elected representative for the passed constitutional proposal—and a scientist—said in an interview with the New York Times during the assembly discussions: We have to assume that human activity causes damage, so how much damage do we want to cause? . . . What is enough damage to live well?16 Thus, if unearthing—the trademark landscape operation of the Anthropocene that produces matter out-of-place—has not represented a judicial conundrum since it can trace back to the basis of the economic relationships between a colony and its empire, reversing the water cycle has. The water cycle has experienced a multitude of manipulations, but the forced passage of seawater through a membrane in an energy-intensive process to obtain freshwater is relatively new and, until recently, reserved for wealthy countries with severe water demandsupply gaps like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait. Baselining as Commoning Practices

Chilean legislation accounts only for continental water as a national good for public use, as detailed in the Civil Code and the Water Code. Seawater is not

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defined nor conceptualized as a national good for public use, even though the beach is, and the argument can be made that one cannot be alienated from the other. As recently as 1982, the judicial aspect of waters that comprise the territorial sea, from which desalination plants operate, were defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as a belt of coastal waters extending 12 nautical miles from the baseline of a coastal state, granting full state sovereignty to the seabed below and airspace above. Regardless, lawmakers today debate how to regulate desalinated water, for it is, after all, the result of an industrial process involving reverse osmosis, a water purification process, and, therefore, not spontaneously found in nature. If someone made it, it is that person’s property; the State has no business interfering with private entrepreneurship leading to economic development. Desalinated water obtained from seawater would not constitute a common good, instead it has a proprietary nature as an offspring of scarcity and profit opportunities. Debates are still ongoing in Congress; some regard any restriction as an obstacle to investment, and others demand compensation for taking advantage of a free resource, especially if a mining company with huge dividends is behind it. During the constitutional process Chile undertook between 2021 and 2022 to write a democratic Constitution, Chapter III: Nature and Environment brought about comments regarding the lack of legal certainty companies would have when evaluating Chile as a site for investment.17 Legal certainty became a proxy for impunity to carry out exploitative and extractive businesses at the cost of the environment many human and non-human communities inhabit. With all its intentions in the right place the Constitution proposal still commodified nature as a “good”—a resource or thing—casting the same transactional light through which it views nature today, a framework internalized through capitalist thinking. Water then is a common closer to a definition of a public-state-owned resource that only challenges the view of it being private property instead of igniting conversations on collective ownership and management, the true meaning of a common. In the discussions about commons, the proposition for an ontological shift that views the matter as relational practice between ­collectives—not ­individuals—gives rise to the concept of commoning. The practice of commoning, not the distribution of common ‘goods’ amongst all members of a nation state, should be at the center of new futures based on different ways of making worlds. In commoning the individual gives way to a collective that operates on shared actions, a proposition that demands active participation, that requires work and involvement from all members to function; therefore the practice of commoning highlights the interdependence and relational nature of everything. Silke Helfrich, co-founder of  Commons-Institut in Germany, proposes as one of the dimensions of commoning that “commoning has the potential to foster a responsible stewardship of nature.”18 If the new Constitutional Proposal being

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drafted today maintains the Defensory of Nature (Defensoría de la Naturaleza) attribution of promoting the education and formation in nature’s rights and environment, we could find a starting point to this new framework around commoning that could update our passive and consumeristic relationship with the environmentalist agenda. Within that attribution lies a myriad of practices that constitute baselining, under citizen science programs or local stewardship initiatives that could bridge the distance we have with nature, returning to practices and knowledge generations lost along the way to becoming a modern nation. If in this scenario there are no true commons left to steward, let then baselining become the commoning practice that communities engage with to gather information about their landscape, and a vehicle to acknowledge connections human and non-humans establish, which are the support to everything. In Chile, the entrepreneurial spirit has been favored by economists since the Chicago Boys infused the 1980 Constitution with the teachings of Milton Friedman’s neoliberal premises. The individual, not the collective, is at the center of the actions that separate water from its environment. The “never done before” terrain is fertile ground for engineering ingenuity that displaces the commons into the realm of private property and dismantles it through pipes, membranes, and pools by re-routing, forcing, and accumulating as a good no longer seen as public. Infrastructural decisions make a claim to the land and redraw what the public now assumes is private property. Suppose we are to contest our assumptions on what we collectively own instead of individually possess, recognizing the bare-ground ecohistories19 of the places we extract from that allow us to see the different scales on which we collaborate with other entities. Acknowledging these different scales is central to transforming how we interact in public spaces. If our leisure activities shift to engage in public spaces through baselining, there lies a possibility of a commoning practice of collectively keeping records of environmental decline with which to contest extractive activities and bring agency to disenfranchised communities at the margins of decision-making. Collective baselining has the potential to build a decentralized archive of change that considers the nuanced social practices enacted by a certain community instead of relying on private companies and consultants, with a clear conflict of interest, to keep it for them. Through this commoning practice born out of the necessity of tracking degradation, there is an opportunity to move the discussion from the commons object/property schema that explores the situation from the perspective of the individual to a phenomenon situated in the participation and exchange between human and non-human collectives in a particular territory. In that case, one must start with extending kinship in solidarity with the more-than-human beings that weave with us and dispute the legal apparatus, norms, and procedures that allow only one world to come into existence.

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Notes 1 The late Chilean writer and performance artist Pedro Lemebel in a letter to businessman Sebastián Piñera in December  2008, made “the gluttony of having so much” phrase a recurring one every time public opinion shamed the wealthy class for their excesses as land grabbers. In that same letter, he also hinted at the soon-to-be president’s Eurocentric ways of seeing the Mapocho river in Santiago like the Seine River in Paris, for his efforts at designing it like its European counterpart. However, the Mapocho is a murky stream at best. Instead of clear waters, it drags sediments through the steep mountain slopes from the Andes via a small flow unsuited for navigation. Again, the short distance between the Andes and the Pacific creates a topography that challenges the Eurocentric ideas of urban riverfront design. 2 For further discussion on drip irrigation as a sociotechnical phenomenon that alters how society is organized see J.-P. Venot, M. Kuper, and M. Zwarteveen, eds., Drip Irrigation for Agriculture: Untold Stories of Efficiency, Innovation and Development (London: Routledge, 2017), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315537146. 3 Francisco Gardiazabal Irazabal, “History and Development of the Avocado in Chile,” California Avocado Society Yearbook 85 (2001): 113–28. 4 Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA’s) were born out of United States legislation in the early 1970s to predict the effect of a proposed project on the environment, and it became ubiquitous after the World Bank introduced them as a mandatory procedure for developing countries to secure loans for projects in the 1980s. In Chile, these records began in 1993 with the creation of CONAMA (Environmental National Corporation) and are in many cases the only knowledge citizens have about environmental impact on their territory. These records are public and register the concerns of a given community via comment submissions at public hearings. They are comprised of baseline studies and impact assessments, becoming the best account available for studying landscape transformations through what makes it into the report and what is left out, as well as the transactional character of remediation strategies that commodify our understandings of nature. 5 For a critical analysis of the lack of reliable and uncompromised scientific knowledge the Chilean State currently has on its own territory see Javiera Barandiarán, Science and Environment in Chile: The Politics of Expert Advice in a Neoliberal Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 6 Both the Water Code and the Mining Code regulate Miner’s Water, rights created during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and later protected by the governments that followed. It grants the owners of mining properties the right to freely use waters that surface due to extraction of mineral ore. These waters can be used for exploration, exploitation, or for the benefit of the mining company, and the State can’t revoke them. 7 Maria-Christina Fragkou, Tamara Monsalve-Tapia, Vicente Pereira-Roa, and Maximiliano Bolados-Arratia, “Abastecimiento de agua potable por camiones aljibe durante la megasequía. Un análisis hidrosocial de la provincia de Petorca, Chile,” EURE 48, no. 145 (2022), https://doi.org/10.7764/EURE.48.145.04. 8 Since 1997 the Laguna Conchalí wetland is property of the mining company Los Pelambres (MLP). The company applied for the Ramsar designation in 2004. In a statement, the company indicates it’s pursuing a mission for environmental stewardship, despite the industrial activities it performs right next to it in the port that ships copper concentrate, https://rsis.ramsar.org/ris/1374?language=en. 9 José Adán, a local fisherman of Los Vilos Fishermen Union, in an on-site interview with the author, July 2021.

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10 Javiera Barandiarán, “Documenting Rubble to Shift Baselines: Environmental Assessments and Damaged Glaciers in Chile,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3, no. 1 (March 2020): 58–75, https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619873317. 11 Rob Holmes, “The Problem with Solutions,” Places Journal, July  2020, accessed September 17, 2022, https://doi.org/10.22269/200714. 12 Financing for Aguas Pacífico’s Aconcagua desalination project comes from Brazilian equity firm Patria Investments, in which the American investment company Blackstone capital holds a majority stake. 13 Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 41. 14 S. Ureta, T. Lekan, and W. G. von Hardenberg, “Baselining Nature: An Introduction,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3, no. 1 (March 2020): 3–19, https:// doi.org/10.1177/2514848619898092. 15 The term baselining, or the practice of building a baseline, is essential to the development of disciplines like ecology that trough taxonomies set out to organize the world of the 18th century. 16 Somini Sengupta, “Chile Writes a New Constitution, Confronting Climate Change Head On,” New York Times, December 28, 2021, accessed September 20, 2022, www. nytimes.com/2021/12/28/climate/chile-constitution-climate-change.html. 17 The constitutional process is still ongoing since the first proposal was rejected by 62% of voters on September 4, 2022. Chapter III, titled Nature and Environment, was a forward-looking text centered on environmental justice, intergenerational solidarity, accountability, and fair climate action. It declared a mineral statute that claimed the wealth of unearthed materials for the State and recognized the territorial sea, seabed, and beaches as natural, common goods. 18 Silke Helfrich, “Practices of Commoning,” in Explorations in Urban Practice: Urban School Ruhr Series (Barcelona: DPR-Barcelona, 2017). 19 A term coined by Anna Tsing to allow for the making of history in which humans and non-humans have worked to remake an altered landscape. P. Harvey, C. KrohnHansen, and K. G. Nustad, eds., “10. When the Things We Study Respond to Each Other: Tools for Unpacking ‘the Material’,” in Anthropos and the Material (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 221–44, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478003311-012.

Bibliography Adán, José. Interview with the author, July 2021. Barandiarán, Javiera. “Documenting Rubble to Shift Baselines: Environmental Assessments and Damaged Glaciers in Chile.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3, no. 1 (2020): 58–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619873317. Barandiarán, Javiera. Science and Environment in Chile: The Politics of Expert Advice in a Neoliberal Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Fragkou, Maria-Christina, Tamara Monsalve-Tapia, Vicente Pereira-Roa, and Maximiliano Bolados-Arratia. “Abastecimiento de agua potable por camiones aljibe durante la megasequía. Un análisis hidrosocial de la provincia de Petorca, Chile.” EURE 48, no. 145 (2022). https://doi.org/10.7764/EURE.48.145.04. Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997. Harvey, P., C. Krohn-Hansen, and K. G. Nustad, eds. “10. When the Things We Study Respond to Each Other: Tools for Unpacking ‘the Material’.” In Anthropos and the

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Material, 221–44. Duke University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/978147 8003311-012. Helfrich, Silke. “Practices of Commoning.” In Explorations in Urban Practice: Urban School Ruhr Series. Barcelona: DPR-Barcelona, 2017. Holmes, Rob. “The Problem with Solutions.” Places Journal, July 2020. Accessed September 17, 2022. https://doi.org/10.22269/200714. Irazabal, Francisco Gardiazabal. “History and Development of the Avocado in Chile.” California Avocado Society Yearbook 85 (2001): 113–28. Sengupta, Somini. “Chile Writes a New Constitution, Confronting Climate Change Head On.” New York Times, December  28, 2021. Accessed September  20, 2022. www. nytimes.com/2021/12/28/climate/chile-constitution-climate-change.html. Ureta, S., T. Lekan, and W. G. von Hardenberg. “Baselining Nature: An Introduction.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3, no. 1 (2020): 3–19. https://doi. org/10.1177/2514848619898092. Venot, J.-P., M. Kuper, and M. Zwarteveen, eds. Drip Irrigation for Agriculture: Untold Stories of Efficiency, Innovation and Development. London: Routledge, 2017. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9781315537146.

10 DESIGN IN PARTICIPATORY JUSTICE PROCESSES The Sepur Zarco Case of Guatemala Elis Mendoza

In the vastness of the white courtroom, where the Guatemala Court for HighRisk Crimes hears cases related to human rights violations, a group of Mayan Q’eqchi’ women sits tightly together with their heads and part of their faces covered by perrajes, traditional colorful shawls. The use of the shawls, described by media as a necessity to guard their anonymity, was met with resistance by some of their supporters who feared that the action could be interpreted as an admission of shame by the women at the center of a case of sexual violence. The one thing their critics were right about was that the use of perrajes was a political decision made by the women who became a recognizable public collective. The Q’eqchi’ women used it to reclaim their agency by choosing the circumstances under which they would show their faces. Similarly to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo who wore their white headscarves during el Juicio de las Juntas,1 the women of Sepur instrumentalized their clothing as symbols of mourning, fight, and strength, a way of asserting their right to decide how to conduct their search for justice. Las abuelas de Sepur were the plaintiffs in a case of sexual and domestic slavery during the internal conflict in Guatemala (1982–1987) sited in the village of Sepur Zarco. Together with feminist and indigenous organizations, they imagined and carved a new juridical space to demand the recognition of the crimes committed against them, the government’s responsibility, and the historical debt to their communities. It was a highly mediatized case since it was the first time the Guatemalan justice opened a criminal process against military members for sexual abuse. The legal team argued that sexual violence was a type of torture embedded in war logistics; the purpose was to typify it as a crime against humanity and not a common crime of the private sphere by appealing DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-13

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FIGURE 10.1 Las Abuelas of Sepur Covered by Perrajes. Image Courtesy of Mujeres

Transformando el Mundo/Rocizela Pérez

to international laws that Guatemala had signed.2 As anthropologist Rita Laura Segato has argued in her expert report on this case,3 the military use of sexual violence against the indigenous women in Guatemala was not solely a strategy to humiliate the campesinos involved in claims to land tenure; it was mainly directed at tearing apart their communities.4 In a similar strategy, the military used enforced disappearance and scorched earth campaigns paired with the demolition of churches, schools, and markets to effectively erase the symbolic nature of entire villages—more than 640, as communal places of memory.5 The analysis of these strategies revealed a dimension of cruelty towards indigenous populations that went far beyond the territorial control of agricultural lands in favor of large companies of mostly foreign nature. The use of the shawls illustrates the awareness of the plaintiffs—who constituted an NGO to act as part of the legal team instead of being relegated to victims, on the impact of images and media in strategic litigation.6 Within this same frame, the legal team decided to invite us, a team of historians and architects, to produce a forensic architecture investigation. They intended for the work to serve a double purpose: to make visible the women’s lived experiences during the war by deploying a sensory apparatus that could represent what was missing and what had been transformed and to mediatize the case by translating its complexities through visual media to a mass audience, narrating how Sepur, a village that was not even part of the insurgent areas, could be read as a symbolic

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representation of violence against indigenous communities, and as a recipient of savage developmentalism,7 contradicting the historical narratives of a civil war amongst multiple—and equal, factions. For us, it was not a matter of appealing solely to new ways of knowing; the challenge was appealing to new ways of caring. Although not immediately evident, it was in the materiality of the Sepur—or its absence, that some of these violences8 could be visibly traced. The trauma of systemic rape had become, for many years, a private affair. However, the changes in the village, the burned houses, the razed forest, the relocation of the church, the torture pits, and mass graves assisted in telling a more complex and layered story in which the abuelas were central. Sepur Zarco was scorched completely, transforming its social-spatial logic and its condition of fertile agricultural land. Scorched earth became the military’s counterinsurgent tactic of choice; it was deployed to castigate indigenous rebel communities and dissuade those that offered assistance to the communist guerrillas. Thus, the village, as it was before the war and as it exists after its reconfiguration, has become a contested mnemonic field. The scenario in which past and present systemic strategies of violence have been challenged and resignified through the work of las abuelas and their families joined by an international community of feminist jurists, anthropologists, sociologists, social workers, human rights advocates, architects, and designers forming an emotional community that in turn became a path to reestablishing bonds of trust and care between the indigenous populations and society at large.9 This text delves into the process of justice pursued by las abuelas de Sepur as a continuous practice of commoning following Cristian Alarcón Ferrani’s reading of Peter Linebaugh’s understanding of the term “as embedded in a labor process.”10 Understanding justice as labor presupposes justice as a common good that can be produced and cultivated. By “producing,” I am borrowing Jean Robert’s11 argument that in its origin, production referred to “an actualization of possible existence . . . an emanation through which something hitherto hidden is brought within the range of man’s senses” tightly intertwined with ordinary people’s experience of nature and their ways of subsistence. Thus, in working the common land, the labor that assisted in this production was, according to Robert, more of an act of propitiation, an open exchange that could lead to new crops if several other tight conditions also entered into this exchange.12 Through this frame, the production of justice, or the processes that brought it to the forefront making it visible, were the consequence of the Q’eqchi women setting the ground for open exchanges between memories of trauma, national legal processes, international treaties—and the groups that mobilize them, the forest and the community of Sepur Zarco. Since the production of justice is deeply related to its capacity of “making visible,” this chapter also reflects on the spatial analysis and methodologies used

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to elaborate the forensic architecture report.13 We sought not only to contribute to the legal justice process but also to the healing and repair processes of the people of Sepur by reconnecting the history and transformations of the village back to the people. Through this line of action, we sought to develop an alternative path for forensic architecture,14 as a discipline, that although operating with the now widely known remote sensing and 3D technologies applied by Forensic Architecture, centered testimony and lived experience as the main sources of its contribution, looking for ways to connect the subjective, the domestic, and the intimate within a narrative of the scientific, the collective, and the universal. Sepur Zarco and the Internal Conflict in Guatemala

The 36-year war in Guatemala, often described as a fratricide or civil war, was an internal conflict in which economic, social, and racial disparities and grievances between the vulnerable Mayan majority, the white and mestizo population of the cities, the military hold of national politics and the foreign capital investments in agriculture derived in a long and diffused political conflict. Both the military in power and the numerous militias they swiftly formed played an active role in an armed conflict where the military—shielded by the Cold War context in which U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s government classified Guatemala as being at risk of turning to communism, declared indigenous populations leftist insurgents. Entire villages were decimated by assassinating and disappearing men and subjecting women and children to brutal violence.15 An essential part of the conflict, which pertains to this case, rested in what Silvia Federici has identified as new enclosures: the destruction of common land and the enactment of a wealth transfer to capitalist entities.16 The Guatemalan government could not have achieved this transfer without the complete submission of the indigenous body that, through violence, could be tamed, uprooted by its relocation to the Model Villages, and exploited in mono-crop plantations. The land, the burned village, and women’s bodies were all attacked and dismantled at their symbolic and material levels. In investigations of the war and its aftermath, areas like Ixchil have often been identified as places of combative resistance,17 while Panzós, the municipality closest to Sepur, had been overlooked as one of many places that suffered under the war. Consequently, mass grave exhumations did not start until the first decade of the 21st century.18 The conflict in the Panzós area heightened in 1974 as the indigenous farmers of these communities attempted to start their land tenure processes through the National Institute of Agrarian Transformation in Guatemala City. After that first attempt, some of the leaders never came back. Four years later, on May 29th, 1978, as the communities kept organizing, the military clashed with residents of the nearby villages that had gone to Panzós to demand the government

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recognition of their land rights during a protest. Initially, the media had reported 35 assassinations, calling it the Massacre of Panzós; today, we know that the number is closer to 200.19 This massacre began a reign of terror in the municipality, exacerbated by the emplacement of military outposts throughout the country. The government coerced many of the surviving peasants to work in the mono-crop fields, relocating them to model villages—military hamlets that reorganized the territory as part of the agricultural pacification programs. Within four years (1981–1985), more than 23 military zones had been deployed. Through this spatial logic, the Guatemalan indigenous lands became an occupied territory in which the military shaped their inhabitants’ access to resources, movements, gatherings, and daily life activities through multiple levels of control.20 In Sepur Zarco, the military planned the outpost as a place of rest and leisure for the troops. The men that the military did not disappear or incarcerate were forced to build the outpost and later to provide free labor. The consequences of the placement of this outpost in Sepur were devastating to the women around the village who were forced to provide food for the soldiers, cook, and do their laundry and were repeatedly subjected to beatings, corporal punishment, and rape. During some of the first incursions of the military into Sepur, a group of women managed to escape into the forest with their children; after being on constant move for months trying to avoid an encounter with the soldiers, some of the younger children died from starvation. In their testimonies, the women described how they had to leave behind their bodies under a bed of leaves due to the lack of time they had to give them a proper burial. For both groups of women, those who remained in servitude and those who escaped, the armed conflict brought unimaginable loss and suffering, turning the forest into a place of grief and a place of protection that would, in time, become ingrained in their search for justice and their claim of belonging. After the war, Sepur Zarco, like most of the villages in Guatemala, was repopulated by retired soldiers and collaborationists, former militia, widows, orphans, and a dismayed population, all of whom had experienced a series of traumatic events from different sides of the war spectrum. For many years, the women at the outpost could not name what they had experienced at the military outpost. Once the armed conflict was over and the surviving residents had returned to their villages, they entered a silent period of mourning and shame, which they lived privately. In 1994, as the work of the Truth Commission (Comisión de Esclarecimineto Histórico, CEH) started, the Mayan women subjected to sexual violence were often interviewed as witnesses of higher crimes such as murder and disappearance. The systemic rape that they had suffered was rarely at the center of these inquiries. Guatemala Memoria del Silencio, the final report by the commission, mentioned sexual violence as part of the abuses against the Mayan communities. However, the committee made no recommendations pertaining to

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sexual violence or as a path to restorative justice. In the trial against former president Efraín Ríos Montt, rape was part of the testimonies, included in a series of crimes of genocide, but not as a crime worth pursuing in itself. One of the reasons the Guatemalan legal system took so long to recognize rape as a war tactic, dismissing it instead as a byproduct of war, was the lack of data on its systematic use and the silence of the communities around this particular type of crime. Feminist activists Amandine Fulchirone and Yolanda Aguilar, who have worked extensively with Mayan sexual victims, explain that in Mayan culture, traumatic events are sometimes perceived as susto or fright, a moment in which the soul leaves the body after shock. In order to bring back the soul to the body, a ceremony must take place led by an Aj’Quij or spiritual guide, usually a man.21 Consequently, for the women of Sepur, accessing the means to overcome and communicate their experiences posed an almost unsurmountable difficult task. The Court of Conscience Against Sexual Violence: The Abuelas Lead the Way

The findings of the CEH and the weight of the hundreds of testimonies ignited debates around the historical significance of the commission’s work. It was clear that the real work was just starting. As the CEH report revealed the territorial scope of the violence perpetrated by the military government, especially during Ríos Montt’s mandate, a new generation of human rights advocates that included anthropologists, psychologists, and lawyers turned to the search of mass graves in areas that the commissions had neglected in the past. They were responding to the testimonies of violence that included rape, murder, disappearance, dispossession, child abuse, hunger, and despair. As Enrique Diaz Álvarez argues in La Palabra que Aparece, what moves many of those at the center of atrocities is surviving to be able to tell their stories, but once this transmission has been made, it is the people who listen who now bear the responsibility of what to do with that information, how to process it, how to care for it, and how to walk with the victims.22 The response to this calling is close to Myriam Jimeno’s emotional communities.23 Working in the truth commissions and in the mass graves searches that followed, the ECAP (Equipo de estudios comunitarios y acción psicosocial),24 an organization of psychosocial accompaniment, gathered hundreds of stories of sexual abuse, disappearance, and domestic enslavement. They published these testimonies in the book Tejidos que lleva el alma, which they widely circulated among feminist activists and collectives.25 The work of the ECAP proved crucial in centering sexual violence by providing the first wide recounting of sexual crimes through detailed testimonies. The retold stories of the women opened a path to take sexual abuse to the high justice courts. To prepare the women for the

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long and intricate judicial processes, the legal team attempting to set a precedent started a carefully designed and effective strategy. The NGO Mujeres Tranformando al Mundo was created by a group of activists, lawyers, social workers, physicians, psychologists, and sociologists. Considering ECAP’s experiences with the women, it became clear that the legal strategy had to be built with the community of victims from the first stages of planning. The judicialization of a case of sexual violence as a war crime demanded a census of sexual crimes and the creation of a systematized mining of testimonies. Once the work had started, the legal team noticed that the military outposts were commonly referred to in interviews as places where sexual violence had repeatedly taken place; within these, the Sepur Zarco outpost stood out. In order to achieve the recollection of testimonies, the legal team developed a series of methodologies of care to work with women dealing with trauma aimed at understanding their views and recollections as complex and multifaceted. For instance, by asking them to tell the war stories in the third person, the women could start delving into their lived experiences from a distance. Recognizing the pain and violence inflicted on someone else, as if removed from that reality, allowed them to situate their own. The possibility of displacing a traumatic event to a third body is not always a product of deflection; on the contrary, similarly to the abuelas, Díaz Álvarez describes how Pilar Calveiro, a woman who was forcefully disappeared by military commandos in Argentina for more than a year and a half, uses the third person to be in control of how her testimony would be dissected.26 This relative distance not only protects her for trauma but infuses her testimony with an aura of objectivity and detachment. The abuelas, through the guided exercises, used collective memories of pain from some of the women who did not survive intertwined with their own to conjure a space in which their own memories could safely come forward. Another technique used—with significant relevance to this text, participative communal drawing, prepared the women to tell a story together, recognizing the shared experiences in their lives. Breathing and relaxation exercises, conducted by a therapist, were aimed at reconnecting their minds with their bodies and making them comfortable to talk about specific anatomic parts. Moreover, talking about the women that had died during the war enabled a process of public grief. The other central part of this initial phase was the organization of the Court of Conscience Against Sexual Violence to gather sexual violence specialists and survivors from around the world to prepare the women of Sepur and strategize the path toward legal justice. Setting the Stage for the Sepur Zarco Trial

Even when the women of Sepur had testified in public during the Court of Conscience, anonymity remained crucial to protect them from ostracism within their

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communities. Thus, whenever the legal team held meetings with the plaintiffs in Sepur, most of the village women joined the gatherings to provide a cover to the ones at the center of the case. The goal was to protect them from further rejection and to keep the details of the legal process secret, by pretending to attend workshops and health classes. Over a dozen experts traveled to work with the women of Sepur. Rita Laura Segato, one of the first scholars to define and theorize femicide in Latin America, authored the anthropological report, providing an epistemological frame through which all the experts could assess the scale of the violence inflicted. Many other feminist specialists were simultaneously conducting psychological, military, sociological, and forensic work in each field. As architecture historians specialized in conflict and working within the frame of forensic architecture and visual investigations, our research focused on three scales of spatial analysis: the forest, the village, and the military outpost. First, the region: we analyzed the changing patterns of the Mayan forest as a main character and as a victim of the war, tracing its devastation, deforestation, and desertification processes resulting from decades of monocrops. If the forest had been the Mayan people’s protector, home, and food provider, then its decay corollary to scorched earth campaigns could be directly tied to the genocide attempt on its people. This first frame of analysis made use of the technological view from above. During the war, the Guatemalan military had extensively used aerial photographs, maps, and helicopters to segment the forest, burn through its vastness and design new monocrops, to the detriment of the traditional milpa system that paired nitrate-producing bean plants with shadow-providing coffee or corn. Using the images produced by the same technologies that allowed for the war logic to be implemented required us to question what effects the mobilization

FIGURE 10.2.A Analysis

of Land Use Patterns After Scorched Earth Campaigns. Image by Daniele Profeta © Daniele Profeta

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of a technoscientific language and gaze could bring to the ways in which the testimonies of the victims at the center of the trial would be valued; what kind of information could our methods reveal at the regional scale that could tie indigenous women’s bodies with the burning forests? As architecture researcher Nishat Awan argues, “such seeing operates through a fantasy of a frictionless world that can be accessed by zooming in and out of far-flung places viewed through scopic regimes that render certain aspects hyper-visible while obscuring others.”27 The challenge was, therefore, to resist this fantasy and be willing to face the problematic aspects of the analysis at this scale.

FIGURE 10.2.B Analysis

of Land Use Patterns After Scorched Earth Campaigns. Image by Daniele Profeta © Daniele Profeta

FIGURE 10.2.C Analysis

of Land Use Patterns After Scorched Earth Campaigns. Image by Daniele Profeta © Daniele Profeta

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FIGURE 10.3 Area

Where Remains of the Foundations For The Perimetral Fence of the Military Outpost Were Found. Courtesy Elis Mendoza © Elis Mendoza

After analyzing both historical photographs and satellite imagery, a pattern started to emerge: small agricultural lands giving way to larger monocrops, large parts of the forests being absorbed into this new capitalist enterprise, while other areas of the forest, the higher lands, were completely burned down sectioning the forest and impeding the people to take refuge. Nevertheless, more than these primarily operative and evident consequences, we cannot forget that for the Mayan peoples, the survival of their land is the only way to ensure their survival. Therefore, the task became to learn to see the forest anew, not just as a series of composite images full of data, but as the places that suffered through the described violences with its people. The forest, considered as an enemy, that had been burned and made barren; the forest as the place where women wandered with their children who starved to death, who were continuously led by fire, hunger, and bullets as if they were mice in a maze; the forest that has for more than 30 years been a massive mass grave; and the forest that has suffered and shrunk as a consequence of climate change. To achieve this new reading, we developed a series of forest psychocartographies to depict the experiences of the groups of women and children who wandered though the forest for years. The second scale, the village, delved into the destruction patterns followed by the military and the changes in the placement of spaces of social gathering that included schools, churches, and public squares or plazas. We argued that the morphological changes at the village level, exerted during and after the war, were directed at severing the relationship between the village as a symbolic

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FIGURE 10.4 Analysis

of Area of Interest 1 and 2 in Alta Vera Paz—1987. The Diagram Shows the Spatial Relationship Between the East West Connective Corridor, the Newly Established Settlements, and the Landing Strips Strategically Positioned Along the Territory. © Instituto Geográfico Nacional de Guatemala, 1987

place of memory and its inhabitants. In Cinco Debates, Segato reminds us that the Guatemalan war was not just a war to end communist insurrection. Its logic was sophisticated and carefully designed. The analysis of political and economic relationships allowed us to read Guatemala as a tactical laboratory of dissidence management sponsored by the United States and Israel intelligence agencies.28 More than 300 villages were burned to the ground and repeatedly destroyed and reconfigured. The campesinos were forced to travel to work since they became landless, and a new type of local economic migrant, permanently vulnerable, was born. The third level of analysis, the military outpost, examined the experiences of the women and men held as prisoners in the camp and forced into sexual and domestic servitude. It analyzed the logic under which the military built the Sepur Zarco outpost as a place of leisure and rest for the troops. Our task was to provide the judge with a faithful reconstruction of the events narrated by the plaintiffs. The main question was if the generals saw the women as part of the “perks” for their soldiers in their time off. It was also to make visible that for Mayan women, sexual violence and domestic slavery were equally traumatizing. By forcing the women to provide food, cook, and clean for the soldiers while their children were starving and neglected, they were left with a sense of shame for not being able to protect their lands and their kids and for being sexually involved with soldiers, even if it was through force. These different levels of

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violences simultaneously targeted their roles as mothers, wives, carers, farmers, and community members, shattering their sense of self and relegating their traumatic experiences to the private sphere. Regarding the methodological approach, we understood the importance of working with the community. To that end, we enlisted the men of Sepur, who were very young during the war, in drawing a participatory cartography that provided the information for the architectural reconstruction of the village and the outpost. Many of the men gathered around the map had been forced to build the military outpost. They managed to remember and recreate the camp’s measurements, materials, and other specific details by talking to each other. This was one of the first opportunities they had to directly contribute to the justice efforts led by the women and one of the first times they were encouraged to talk about their experiences in the camps as part of the men who did not take a direct part in the conflict. Once we had built the model, the plaintiffs contrasted their stories against it, filled in the rest of the necessary information, and approved the process. Similarly, through their testimonies, the forest psychocartographies were transformed from forestation maps to lived territories that once provided shelter and cover to many women and children who went hiding. As with the third body, the testimonies of the women were displaced from the victims to the spatial reconstructions,

FIGURE 10.5 A  Group

of Men from Sepur Zarco and Neighboring Villages Work Together on a Map of Sepur Previous to the War. Courtesy Elis Mendoza © Elis Mendoza

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and similarly to the lawyers before us, we also became the bearers of these preserved testimonies with the task of making them legible. It was essential for us to make clear the ties between the destruction of the forest, the burning, the rearrangement of the villages, and the domestic and sexual abuse. We argued that they followed a pattern of destruction aiming at the disintegration of the community and at severing their ties to the land and each other, a strategy so effective that its consequences would endure decades after the war was over. The Trial as Indigenous and Gendered Constructed Spaces

By the time the trial began, it had already attracted media outlets and international attention. The abuelas in Guatemala wearing their perrajes over their heads also became a powerful representative image of the fight for transitional justice. Before the trial, the legal team prepared the abuelas of Sepur for the mediatized nature as part of the strategic litigation. They understood that with international attention and a full panel of experts, the legitimation of their stories could go through an easier path. To prepare, they worked with the social workers in a mural depicting the trial as a forest where each animal represented one of the participants: the judge as the owl, the district attorney was a parrot, the accused lieutenant and the military commissioner were the lion and the wolf, the psychologist was the pigeon, the translator the hummingbird, and the abuelas were represented by the butterflies that fluttered through the mural. They enacted the stages and possible setbacks of the trial as a long and arduous process where each animal had a role to play.29 This trial anecdote reveals the extent to which the legal team shaped its processes to fit and embrace the Q’eqchi’ cosmogony, which in turn highlighted how far the Guatemalan legal system was from being functional and accessible to the Mayan population in a country where they constitute the majority. The trial was held in the Court for High-Risk Crimes and was presided over by judge Iris Yassmin Barrios Aguilar and presented by the prosecutor’s office accompanied by the adhesive complainants MTM, the feminist NGO created for this case led the legal strategy, and Colectiva Jalok U, the collective formed by the abuelas to present themselves as part of the legal team and reasserting their role as political subjects, and not just as victims. The abuelas were keen on centering sexual and domestic violence in the trial instead of other crimes such as extrajudicial killings or assault. The lawyers had to convince the prosecutor that a crime of sexual violence, tried collectively, could be typified as an international crime against humanity. Through the development of the trial, many other crimes were described and brought in. For instance, enforced disappearance proved crucial in explaining why the soldiers abused women they thought were unprotected; starvation and land dispossession could be brought in as other modalities of torture aimed at the family nucleus.

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In other words, through the laboring of the trial, the abuelas produced a generous space to narrate other stories of violence and dispossession to open trauma, becoming a collective grieving body. In this way, the trial allowed us to visualize the cruelty directed toward Mayan populations. This generosity stems from the clarity the abuelas had about justice as a common process; returning to Linebaugh, in writing about the Magna Carta, he argued that it granted perpetuities, not rights since “common rights are entered into by labor . . . independent of the temporalities of the state.” Similarly, by communing the justice process, taking it outside of the transactional logic of capitalism, the abuelas and the people of Sepur standing beside them were looking to establish more than just a legal sentence. They were looking to assert their rights and humanity in perpetuity, outside of the purview of the state, transcending its borders through their boundless emotional community. Conclusion

Regardless of the power of testimony and collective organization, we must recognize that since for the courts the legal processes require certain warranties, the case was able to advance because the plethora of expert witnesses’ reports reinforced the testimonies. This was made evident by the preponderance given to the expert witnesses in comparison to the recorded testimonies of the victims.30 The trial concluded with two sentences, one for 120 years against a former military commissioner and 240 years against a military commander accused of crimes against humanity for fostering and allowing a climate of sexual abuse and domestic enslavement. Nevertheless, since justice is a continuous process of community labor, the court’s demands for economic reparations of the accused and the 16 measures to be implemented by the state, recognized as co-­ responsible and to guarantee non-repetition were seen by all the implicated as important as the main sentence itself. In other words, the crime would not just end with a sentence but with the promise of a continuous support and recognition of fault by the state. Several of these measures had important spatial qualities; after all, the abuelas never abandoned their claims to the lands that started this conflict and the restitution of their villages. Among these measures were a sexual health education clinic, a school for girls to access high school education, a crypt and memorial for the remains of the husbands that had been found, a monument to the abuelas of Sepur, a collective orchard, and land with dignified houses for the abuelas. The trial and the path that the abuelas had set together—with the emotional community of experts, resulted in not only the abuelas taking off their perrajes once they won the trial and felt safe but also the opportunity to be recognized by their community first as victims, then as survivors, and now as trailblazers. Reports, drawing books, and comics have been translated into several Mayan

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languages and distributed around the Mayan population to teach others how there is a path to justice and the ways in which they can navigate the justice system. The monument and the memorial in Sepur have been highly contentious since there are still relatives of those convicted and people who collaborated with the military among its inhabitants. Regardless, the abuelas and the organizations behind the trial are still demanding for all the restitutions to be met. After the trial, a new historical horizon has emerged for the people at the center of these violences, and the memorialization of that process will determine how the community reconstructs and heals itself. With respect to the community of experts, the frequent use of strategic litigation in particular cases to set a specific legal precedent can always be contentious and questionable and I am afraid that is too complex for the scope of this chapter. Still, with a faulty system, this type of internationalized case often becomes the only possible path to some type of justice. However, I  would like to close with David Graeber’s reflection on what a “non-vanguardist intellectual practice” should be to think about the role of the experts in juridical spaces: “to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts.”31 He used this formulation to envision a new type of social theory which had two sides, “one ethnographic and one utopian, suspended in a constant dialogue.” If the trials around human rights violations will continue to be ‘produced’ by transnational and multidisciplinary communities working closely with and for those at the center of the claims, Graeber’s suggestion sets a path for the role of the experts, as a type of mirror or registry that pays attention to the survivors to carefully offer back the image filtered through a series of lenses provided by their different disciplines and backgrounds, hoping that it will contribute in some way. Notes 1 El Juicio de las juntas was a trial against nine Argentinian commanders of the first three juntas that formed the first dictatorship (1976–1983). By order of president Raúl Alfonsín, Julio César Strassera, the prosecutor for the case, brought charges against the military for homicide, kidnapping, and torture. During the trial (1985) the Madres were asked by the judge to remove their headscarves for being considered a political symbol. Such had been their notoriety as a group that the headscarves had become a symbol of resistance against the dictatorship. For the mothers the headscarves represented the diapers their disappeared children used as infants, a permanent reminder of their absence. The trial marks a watershed moment in HRL and amongst LatinAmerican HR lawyers and activists. 2 Second Lieutent Esteelmer Reyes Girón and former army commissioner Heriberto Valdez Asig were found guilty of crimes against humanity in the form of: sexual violence, sexual and domestic servitude, humiliating and degrading treatment, murder,

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and enforced disappearance against women of the Mayan Q’eqchi’ community. I use the space of this note to name the perpetrators because the aim of this writing is to recognize and center the fight of the women who went to court and the women who accompanied them in their legal journey. The names of the perpetrators have been legally recognized, widely published, and written into the legal sentence. For information on the judicial sentence see Sentencia Caso Sepur Zarco, “Sentencia C-01076–2012–00021. Of. 2,” Tribunal Primero de Sentencia Penal, Narcoactividad y Delitos contra el Ambiente Guatemala 26 (2016). 3 Anthropologist Rita Segato acted as the anthropological expert at the Sepur Zarco trial. She has released her legal report which has not been published. See, Rita Laura Segato, Juicio Sepur Zarco: Peritaje antropológico cultural de género, Parts 1, 2 and 3 (Ciudad de Guatemala: Ministro Público de Guatemala, 2016). 4 Rita Laura Segato, “Cinco debates feministas: temas para una reflexión divergente sobre la violencia contra las mujeres,” in América Latina: de ruinas y horizontes: la política de nuestros días, un balance provisorio, ed. Jorge E. Brenna Becerril (Ciudad de México: Bonilla Artigas, 2018). 5 According to the Truth Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, CEH), the scorched earth policy erased more than 640 villages. 6 Strategic litigation is a type of legal proceeding usually used in human rights cases that aims to contribute to systemic change. Thus, it concerns not only the case at hand but the precedent and the legal paths it can set. 7 H. L. T. Quan, Growth Against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). 8 I use the term in plural following Rossana Reguillo’s classification who, in analyzing narco violence in Mexico argues that there are types of harrowing violence that cannot be contained and defined in a singular expression. She identifies four expressive violences according to their purpose: structural, historical, disciplinary, and diffuse. Rossana Reguillo, “La Narco-máquina y el trabajo de la violencia: apuntes para su descodificación,” (2011), http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/es/e-misferica-82/reguillo. 9 Emotional communities (comunidades emocionales) is a concept developed by Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno to explain the affective and political bonds developed between victims and survivors. Cited in, Natalia De Marinis and Morna MacLeod, “Introducción,” in Comunidades Emocionales: Resistiendo a Las Violencias En América Latina, eds. Morna MacLeod et  al. (Bogotá, Colombia: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2019). 10 Cristián Alarcón, “Action Research for Emancipation: Social-Ecological Relations, Commoning and Basic Conceptual Questions,” in Commons, Sustainability, Democratization, eds. Hans Peter Hansen, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 71. 11 Jean Robert (1937–2020) was a Swiss-born architect and theorist established in Mexico who became part of what Humberto Beck has termed “la Escuela de Cuernavaca,” around the Intercultural Centre for Documentation (CIDOC). The CIDOC was founded by Ivan Illich and frequented by collaborators Valentina Borromans, Jean Robert, Sylvia Marcos, John F. C. Turner, Paulo Freire, Andre Gorz, and many others who were trying to respond to the development of late capitalism from the lens of the Third World. See Humberto Beck, “Jean Robert: Una poética del lugar,” Bajo el Volcán. Revista del Posgrado de Sociología. BUAP 6 (2022). 12 Jean Robert, “Production,” in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge As Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed Books, 2019), 195–200. 13 I worked in this research during my PhD at Princeton University together with Megan Eardley, and Daniele Profeta under the supervision of Eyal Weizman who was a Princeton Global Scholar at the time. 14 I am using forensic architecture in small caps to elaborate a critique of the discipline, its challenges, methodologies, and possibilities and to differentiate it from FA

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(Forensic Architecture), the research practice led by Eyal Weizman at Goldmiths, University of London. Although Weizman is central to both, fa also encompasses other visual research practices, collaborators, and former FA researchers with their own political positions and with practices with diverse foci. 15 The complexity of the conflict does not allow for its fair description in these lines. For a comprehensive description see Memoria Del Silencio Guatemala, Versión Popular Del Resumen Del Informe (Ciudad de Guatemala: Fundación Myrna Mack, 1999); Nunca Más Guatemala, Informe 1 del Proyecto de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (REHMI) ed. (Guatemala, Guatemala: ODHAG, 1998); Ricardo Falla, Masacres De La Selva: Ixcán, Guatemala, 1975–1982 (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1992); Kira Auer, El Conflicto Armado Interno y la transformación de conflictos en Guatemala: una caja de herramientas para su abordaje en el Aula (Guatemala: IIARS, 2015); Cole Blaisier, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). 16 Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: Pm Press, 2018). 17 The military named the area between Santa María Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal, and San Gaspar Chajul the Ixil triangle. It was considered a hotbed for communist guerrillas and therefore its community was particularly punished. The Truth Commission registered 300 massacres in this area. 18 Carlos A Paredes, Te Llevaste Mis Palabras: Vol. 2 (Guatemala: ECAP, ECAP, Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial, 2006), Xii. 19 P. L. Hemerotec, “1978: masacre de Panzós, terrible pasaje del conflicto,” Prensa Libre, May 29, 2018. 20 Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, “Israel, Guatemala, and the Agricultural Roots of an Authoritarian Internationalism,” Cultural Dynamics 31, no. 4 (2019): 350–64. 21 Oswaldo J. Hernández, “La justicia de los perrajes,” Plaza Pública, February 27, 2016, www.plazapublica.com.gt/content/la-justicia-de-los-perrajes. 22 Enrique Díaz Álvarez, “La Política Del Testimonio,” in La Palabra Que Aparece: El Testimonio Como Acto de Sobrevivencia, 207–52 (Mexico: Anagrama, 2021). 23 Ibid. 24 Community Studies and Psychosocial Action Team Association. The ECAP published together with Colectiva ACTORAS DE CAMBIO and the Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas (UNAMG), the book “Tejidos que lleva el alma,” which gathered more than a hundred testimonies of sexual violence survivors. The book was widely circulated among feminist activists and collectives. 25 Interview with Paula Barrios, director of Mujeres Transformando al Mundo (MTM), adhesive plaintiff in the Sepur Zarco case and lead strategist. 26 Enrique Díaz Álvarez, “La Política Del Testimonio,” in La Palabra Que Aparece: El Testimonio Como Acto de Sobrevivencia, 207–52 (Mexico: Anagrama, 2021), 207–52. 27 Nishat Awan, “Digital Witnessing and the Erasure of the Racialized Subject,” Journal of Visual Culture 20, no. 3 (2021): 506–21. 28 Israel provided not only intelligence and training, but it was also the main provider of helicopters, the main surveillance tool in the forest. The Israeli helicopters can be seen in most of the footage about the war, for instance in Peter Kinoy, Pamela Yates, and Paco de Onís, “Granito: How to Nail a Dictator,” Film (2011). See also Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, “Israel, Guatemala, and the Agricultural Roots of an Authoritarian Internationalism,” Cultural Dynamics 31, no. 4 (2019): 350–64. 29 Interview with Paula Barrios. 30 The abuelas were not obligated to give their testimony again since the legal team asked to give them the same treatment as vulnerable victims to avoid being retraumatized and to be able to count on the testimonies of those who were ill.

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31 David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004).

Bibliography Actoras de Cambio. Tejidos que lleva el alma. Guatemala: ECAP, 2011. Alarcón, Cristián. “Action Research for Emancipation: Social-Ecological Relations, Commoning and Basic Conceptual Questions.” In Commons, Sustainability, Democratization, edited by Hans Peter Hansen, et al., 71. New York: Routledge, 2016. Auer, Kira. El Conflicto Armado Interno y la transformación de conflictos en Guatemala: una caja de herramientas para su abordaje en el Aula. Guatemala: IIARS, 2015. Awan, Nishat. “Digital Witnessing and the Erasure of the Racialized Subject.” Journal of Visual Culture 20, no. 3 (2021): 506–21. Beck, Humberto. “Jean Robert: Una poética del lugar.” Bajo el Volcán. Revista del Posgrado de Sociología. BUAP 6 (2022). Blaisier, Cole. The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, CEH (1994). For reference see www.derechoshumanos.net/lesahumanidad/informes/guatemala/informeCEH.htm#:~:text=La%20 Comisi%C3%B3n%20para%20el%20Esclarecimiento,poblaci%C3%B3n%20 guatemalteca%2C%20vinculados%20con%20el. Cutipa-Zorn, Gavriel. “Israel, Guatemala, and the Agricultural Roots of an Authoritarian Internationalism.” Cultural Dynamics 31, no. 4 (2019): 350–64. De Marinis, Natalia, and Morna MacLeod. “Introducción.” In Comunidades Emocionales: Resistiendo a Las Violencias En América Latina, edited by Morna MacLeod, et al. Bogotá, Colombia: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2019. Díaz Álvarez, Enrique. “La Política Del Testimonio.” In La Palabra Que Aparece: El Testimonio Como Acto de Sobrevivencia, 207–52. Mexico: Anagrama, 2021. Falla, Ricardo. Masacres De La Selva: Ixcán, Guatemala, 1975–1982. Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1992. Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018. Graeber, David. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004. Guatemala Memoria Del Silencio. Versión Popular Del Resumen Del Informe. Ciudad de Guatemala: Fundación Myrna Mack, 1999. Guatemala: Nunca Más. Informe 1 del Proyecto de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (REHMI). Edited by Guatemala. Guatemala: ODHAG, 1998. Available here www. derechoshumanos.net/lesahumanidad/informes/guatemala/informeREMHI-Tomo1. htm. Hemeroteca, P. L. “1978: masacre de Panzós, terrible pasaje del conflicto.” Prensa Libre, May 29, 2018. Hernández, Oswaldo J. “La justicia de los perrajes.” Plaza Pública, February 27, 2016. www.plazapublica.com.gt/content/la-justicia-de-los-perrajes. Kinoy, Peter, Pamela Yates, and Paco de Onís. “Granito: How to Nail a Dictator.” Film (2011). Paredes, Carlos A. Te Llevaste Mis Palabras: Vol. 2. Guatemala: ECAP, 2006.

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Reguillo, Rossana. “La Narco-máquina y el trabajo de la violencia: apuntes para su descodificación.” (2011). http://hemisphericinstitute. org/hemi/es/e-misferica-82/ reguillo. Robert, Jean. “Production.” In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, 195–200. London: Zed Books, 2019. Segato, Rita Laura. “Cinco debates feministas: temas para una reflexión divergente sobre la violencia contra las mujeres.” In América Latina: de ruinas y horizontes: la política de nuestros días, un balance provisorio, edited by Jorge E. Brenna Becerril. Ciudad de México: Bonilla Artigas, 2018. Segato, Rita Laura. Juicio Sepur Zarco: Peritaje antropológico cultural de género. Partes 1, 2 y 3. Ciudad de Guatemala: Ministro Público de Guatemala, 2016. Sentencia Caso Sepur Zarco. “Sentencia C-01076–2012–00021.” Of. 2º. Tribunal Primero de Sentencia Penal, Narcoactividad y Delitos contra el Ambiente Guatemala 26 (2016). Quan, H. L. T. Growth Against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012.

11 THE ACCIDENTAL COMMONS Tools for Redistributing Climate Risk Janette Kim

Climate change creates accidental commons. Generally, when we talk about commons, we might describe fisheries, pastures, and housing collectives that pool together shared resources and knowledge. We can imagine alternatives to capitalist arrangements of privatized enclosure that replace competition with cooperation, scarcity with abundance, and extraction with regeneration. Importantly, such arrangements are governed and maintained by the very people whose lives and livelihoods are fed by commoning practices, sustaining the commons as an equitable and enduring model. In the context of climate change, then, how can this promise be sustained when what is shared is not opportunity but risk, and when what transpires results not from consent but crisis? As wildfires, rising seas, and extreme weather disrupt the dominant orders of urban and rural environments, entangled fates across diverse communities have become visible, often for the first time. The inherently ambient nature of planetary warming spreads across political boundaries and links seemingly disconnected conditions. Melting train tracks near the port can disrupt supply chains reaching into the rural hinterlands. Wildfires can devastate rural industrial towns as well as wealthy vacation homes. Sociologist Ulrich Beck described such “communities of danger” as a “risk society” unified across otherwise divergent interests.1 Here, the inescapable “canopy of risk affliction” can compel some to take action on behalf of the collective, even if empathy alone is not reason enough.2 Appealing to a more generous human nature, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit describes how disasters prompt communities to forge localized social bonds. Describing the surprising exuberance found after Hurricane Katrina in citizen-led rescue missions or neighborhood cookouts during a blackout, Solnit writes, “joy matters as a measure of otherwise neglected desires, DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-14

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desires for public life and civil society, for inclusion, purpose, and power.”3 To Solnit, disasters can suspend the competitive, Social Darwinist logics of privatized markets and alienating government bureaucracies to activate “constellations of solidarity, altruism, and improvisation.”4 The hazards of climate risk and the suspension of the status quo it provokes can thus create unintentional—or accidental—commons. All too frequently, though, the assembly of climate commons has not been amicable. It has certainly not been equitable. Climate-related disasters exaggerate deep-seated environmental injustice burdens, wealth concentrations, and resource hoarding. Toxic flood water can stagnate in low-lying communities, along historic contour lines of segregation that coincided with malaria outbreaks a century ago. Blackouts leave those on life support breathless. Even well-­intentioned attempts to mitigate flood risk by building landscaped levees can recharge gentrification pressures. Worse, as watchdogs of disaster capitalism like journalist Naomi Klein have shown, states of emergency are often not accidents at all—far from being products of error or poor judgment, they serve the extraction of power and wealth by corporate and military interests. Climate change amplifies systemic disinvestment and segregated settlement patterns.5 As Indigenous philosopher and climate justice scholar Kyle Powys Whyte has written, the “epistemology of crisis” wielded by risk managers promotes an obsession with urgency that preserves colonial forms of power and privilege.6 The crisis mindset leads its managers to impose solutions without claiming ethical responsibility for their byproducts or sharing power over their enactment. The accidental commons is unifying, responsive, and liberating, but it is also burdensome, extractive, and exploitative. What would it take to empower the former and disarm the latter? Ever-evolving but well-established techniques of commoning have been designed around change and apply especially well to climate volatility. One such move is to restructure consent. As political scientist Elinor Ostrom has written, the key to overcoming the tragedy of the commons— or the inevitable depletion of resources resulting from a prisoner’s dilemmastyle standoff—is the establishment of institutions for knowledge-sharing and cooperation. Ostrom rejects the idea that self-destructive tendencies can only be tempered by government regulation or private land ownership. Instead, she relocates decision-making power within cooperative governance led by the very people who tend the commons. Control over grazing lands, for example, is led by the herders themselves, whose on-the-ground knowledge allows them to best adapt to fluctuating water availability or signs of overgrazing. Another indispensable—and intimately related—strategy is to dismantle the zero-sum logic behind risk. In place of the epistemology of crisis, Whyte promotes a turn to the “epistemology of coordination,” which he defines as “ways of knowing the world that emphasizes the importance of moral bonds—or kinship relationships—for generating the (responsible) capacity to respond to constant

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change.”7 Though Whyte doesn’t describe this as a commons, his description of the interplay between “care, reciprocity, and consent” resonates with techniques of commoning, which replace capitalist logics of scarcity with narratives of shared abundance. Architect Stavros Stavrides has described gifts as one such practice. The sharing of food by protestors in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, for example, produces solidarity not only by redistributing resources to a larger collective, but by activating “creativity, play, passion and experiments in social relations.” As Stavrides writes, these cultural practices create not just “an alternative economy but an alternative to economy.” While crisis thinking distributes burdens and rewards of climate change based on competitive market logics, models of abundance animate forms of social expression and enjoyment eclipsed by such exploitative systems. The same sites of solidarity that Solnit illuminates provide not only a means to survive disaster, but a counter to the precarious systems that produce risk in the first place. It’s tempting to describe an intentional community—a communal living arrangement formed among like-minded members—as a substitute for the accidental commons. Doing so would certainly provide a more pragmatic, and thus more immediate, path to the kinds of solidarity and self-governance that Solnit celebrates. However, as Stavrides warns, the singular and enclosed nature of such arrangements can further exaggerate concentrations of wealth and privilege. In contrast, Stavrides writes, worlds of commoning are not simply worlds of shared beliefs and habits but are strongly connected to ways of sharing that open the circle of belonging and develop forms of active participation in the shaping of the rules that sustain them.8 Commoning negotiates and welcomes difference, not in search of some fixed form of consensus, but as an “open political process.”9 In the context of climate change, then, a porous commons must make room for rural communities alongside urban ones, the undocumented as well as titled citizens, and nonhumans as well as humans. Given the non-consensual nature of climate change, is there a limit to this expansion such commons can withstand? Would the variegated, unintentional collective include market-rate housing developers, clear-cut logging corporations, and insurance adjusters? Does one negotiate with the same commodity-driven and growth-fueled engines that perpetuate risk, inequity, and injustice, or must one extinguish them outright? This chapter explores the accidental commons as an opportunity to grapple with deeply contested forces, not just to sidestep or ameliorate them but to alter them and to hold them responsible. To the indispensable techniques of commoning I  have described—reciprocity and self-governance—we can fold in two additional techniques that mediate between the invited and uninvited

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stakeholders of climate change. While reciprocity cultivates narratives of abundance, redistribution can repair legacies of extraction. While self-governance facilitates consent, agonistic debate can sustain plural perspectives and diverse forms of knowledge. These are techniques I have employed in my work, as an architectural researcher and designer, on climate adaptation in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States. In this chapter, I will focus on two projects that leverage and amplify these four techniques of commoning. One is called the Resilient Equity Hubs project, which began as a contribution to the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge in 2017–2018. This project reshapes the physical and legal spaces of territory and ownership in Oakland, California, in the face of rising seas. The other is called In It Together, a board game I designed as a decision-making tool for the Challenge, which opens up debate around the management of the climate commons. The first orchestrates the space of commoning while the second serves as a tool for its management. Both explore how the accidental commons can help to reckon with and repair entrenched injustices amplified by climate change, foregrounding equity within discussions around commoning. Resilient Equity Hubs

From 2017–2018 I participated in the San Francisco Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge, a design competition organized by municipal agencies that asked ten international teams to propose strategies for adapting to sea level rise. Our team, called the All Bay Collective, joined diverse disciplines together, with urbanists, engineers, biologists, landscape architects, and urban economists at AECOM; architects and landscape architects at Conger Moss Guillard Landscape Architecture, Urban Works Agency at California College of the Arts (which I co-direct), UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, and David Baker Architects; community advocates at Skeo Solutions; housing policy experts at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation; and climate engineers at Silvestrum climate Associates.10 Our team focused on the San Leandro Bay, where questions of racial justice, gentrification, ecological vitality, and flooding are especially charged, but with stark differences in each neighboring community’s relation to risk. San Leandro Bay is indeed an accidental commons, linking Deep East Oakland, the City of Alameda, the Oakland Airport, and a marshland at the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline with the shared risk of rising seas. Floods infiltrate edges of the bay, in turn raising groundwater levels inland and across the fabric of entire neighborhoods.11 Intrusions from the area’s many creeks, sloughs, and lagoons seep into city blocks variously occupied by bungalows built for industrial workers, airport hotels, golf courses, and middle-class ­ single-family homes. As common as these risks are, however, differences persist

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FIGURE 11.1 The

Estuary Commons, Resilient Equity Hubs. Image by Janette Kim/ Urban Works Agency in the All Bay Collective.

along lines of race and class. In Deep East Oakland, especially, crisis is nothing new. Here, the exodus of manufacturing industries, redlining, the demolition of public housing, and predatory lending practices have depleted local livelihoods and systematically prevented its mostly Black and Latinx residents from instituting wealth creation and cultural continuity. The concentration of highways, trucking routes, manufacturing facilities, and a crematorium have stressed lungs and lives. The volatility of the real estate market has led not only to especially high rates of evictions and foreclosures, but to the neglect of warehouses lying vacant, waiting expectantly for the redevelopment of the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum anticipated once the last of three major league sports teams moves out.12 The neighborhood is caught in an impossible bind between disinvestment and redevelopment, and is ironically stressed by both. Meanwhile, on the West side of San Leandro Bay, the City of Alameda averages annual household incomes $67,000 higher than in Deep East Oakland and remains largely protected from economic volatility. Instead, Alameda’s climate exposure is far more acute. Here, many low-lying neighborhoods wrap around artificial lagoons in a series of cul-de-sacs, gracing each property with access to the waterfront, pleasure craft, and even the occasional water slide. As much as they embrace the

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FIGURE 11.2 The

Estuary Commons, Resilient Equity Hubs. Image by Janette Kim/ Urban Works Agency in the All Bay Collective.

water, though, many Alameda homeowners pump water from their basements on a regular basis, and eagerly await government assistance. Alameda residents’ call for collective action is seemingly uncomplicated by legacies of disinvestment and racial exclusion or the irony of sharing wealth with a small, island municipality shored up by its own reliable tax base. To Deep East Oakland advocates, in contrast, far greater than any fear of flooding is the threat that ostensible solutions to it will further disempower residents and accelerate displacement and gentrification. Importantly, Oakland communitybased organizations have chosen to forge smaller collectives, evoking the power and purpose so celebrated by Solnit. This spirit is especially evident in the work of the East Oakland Collective (EOC), Oakland Climate Action Coalition, and Planting Justice—who partnered with our team in the Challenge process— among other community-led organizations such as the Sogorea Te Land Trust and the Sustainable Economies Law Center. These groups have established a grassroots planning process to repair the San Leandro Creek, build flood-tolerant landscapes, and reclaim Indigenous ownership of land. They are building hubs for Black culture and are forging new institutions to hold community-owned solar farms, worker’s cooperatives, and community land trusts. These initiatives reveal inventive and carefully crafted strategies for opening up access to land and resources as a source for collective wealth, and embody “alternatives to economy,” that Stavrides describes. San Leandro Bay is thus not just one commons, but many—from accidental commons that span the bay to more localized, intentional ones scattered ­throughout—all with contrasting motives and methods. The coexistence of these commons is no simple matter. As climate change makes accidental commons more visible, the potential to activate uneven powers, dislocate burdens, and intrude on the protections of smaller collectives becomes only more acute. How

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can these various forms of commoning be relayed in a way that can secure social and racial justice while protecting communities from climate risk? Our design team created a series of proposals collectively titled “The Estuary Commons” to foreground opportunities for sharing resources and spaces across the Bay.13 Though we did not explicitly use the phrase “accidental commons,” we did embrace narratives of both accidental and intentional forms of commoning to reckon with uneven burdens faced by each. We fostered the former to address large-scale ecological change and to redistribute wealth and privilege. We allied with the latter as a less porous commons—one necessary to preserve a space for cultural expression and self-governance by those long excluded from other forms of ostensibly collective power. To do this, CMG and AECOM led our team in the design of a waterfront landscape loop that would protect neighborhoods across Alameda Island, Bay Farm Island, and Deep East Oakland. This new terrain would widen existing edges to accommodate floods, step up and back to support gradual accretion and migration of marsh habitat, and stitch neighborhoods to the water with pathways for people and animals. In parallel, I worked with AECOM’s urban economist Paul Peninger and David Baker Architects’ Brad Leibin to develop an approach we called Resilient Equity Hubs (REHBs), which would form alliances at multiple, overlapping scales across both extended municipal jurisdictions and individual property lines.14 Together, these approaches realized our team’s combined approach towards commoning,

FIGURE 11.3 The

Estuary Commons, Resilient Equity Hubs. Image by Janette Kim/ Urban Works Agency in the All Bay Collective.

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with the landscape loop as both protector and product of the larger collective and Resilient Equity Hubs, which I will focus on here, as an institutional framework for commoning practices at multiple scales. At the most expansive scale, our team debated strategies for creating crossjurisdictional institutions necessary to make widespread flood adaptation possible. A  Geologic Hazard Abatement District (GHAD), for example, could expedite infrastructural projects such as a living levee or tidal ponds by bypassing a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) approval process. Such districts could also use eminent domain powers to acquire vacant parcels, such as land-banked warehouses adjacent to the Oakland Coliseum and provide social infrastructure for community members. The hope here was that such an agency could wield power on behalf of the sprawling accidental commons of the San Leandro Bay, but the potential for reversion to top-down Urban Renewal-style removal projects was too great for our team to pursue this approach without far more extensive collaboration. Such tactics would collectivize funds, but they would also disarm self-governance. As Deep East Oakland’s own urban history reminds us, expanding the scale of so-called collective agencies often makes them less inclusive. We sought other strategies of redistributing wealth across the bay and focused on Community Benefits Districts (CBDs) as one principal strategy. CBDs are special districts with the power to tax property owners or form a Community Benefits Agreement with future developers. The latter could capture anticipated increases in land value created by future development or infrastructural improvements such as our proposed estuary loop. Profits could then be redirected to community groups who might choose to create affordable housing, grants to small businesses, or subsidized day care centers. Admittedly, CBDs are no panacea. They are rightfully criticized for prioritizing the interests of landowners, and for their complicity with the commodification of property. Indeed, they only profit if developers profit. To head off these tendencies, our team proposed that the district be governed through a participatory budgeting process and administered by a consortium of community-based organizations including many we partnered with, as well as groups across an ever-expanding circle of members. CBDs are also one of several value capture mechanisms that can meaningfully redistribute wealth—wealth that would otherwise get extracted from the neighborhood— and secure it in the very hands of those who have crafted the culture and livelihood of that place. As urban planning scholar Susan Fainstein has written, value capture policies fulfill the claim made by Henri Lefebvre and others that the increase of land value should “belong to all inhabitants of a city,” and that the “wealth of a city is created through collective action and therefore should not be privately owned.”15 In this way, our team formalized and instituted ties across the accidental commons to put pressure on reluctant forces. This approach could enable redistribution where the market alone certainly does not.

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To the extent that profit motives are never fully disarmed by the structure of CBDs, though, other scales of commoning provide a necessary counterpoint. Where our team’s extended landscape loop and inclusive CBD could fold in even some of its most reluctant constituents, local hubs can reserve power for those long excluded from city governance. In this sense the less porous commons created by our East Oakland partners was critical to disarming the extractive nature of speculative development. To Fainstein, “the elimination of the market in land is a prerequisite,” and most effectively realized through public land ownership or community land trusts (CLTs).16 Because CLTs restrict the resale value of land, they secure affordable ownership by taking housing off the speculative market. In the context of sea level rise, CLTs offer a particular capacity to support incremental change without displacing existing residents. In addition to the estuary loop and the REHBs proposals, a third element of the Estuary Commons proposal was landscape architect Kristina Hill’s design for “Tidal Cities.” This approach would cut and fill earthwork to create lagoons that support floating neighborhoods. Tidal Cities would embrace the inevitable intrusion of groundwater, rise with the seas, filter pollutants in stormwater, and protect structures from liquefaction risk in an earthquake.17 Most interesting from a commoning perspective, such lagoons alleviate the pressure of rising groundwater in adjacent land, benefiting those beyond the boundaries of a single parcel of land. They are good neighbors. In the team’s initial research, we envisioned a patchwork of tidal ponds located along tidal channels and interspersed within existing neighborhoods. The process could begin at vacant and publicly owned sites, and then expand through community land trust ownership structures as flood risk increases. Because CLT members own land collectively but buildings individually, a trust could hold ownership of both the tidal ponds and dry land, and thus share the burdens and advantages of each. Additionally, in cases when existing buildings couldn’t withstand floods, residents could move within the CLT, perhaps to new construction over a tidal pond. This would support adaptation without displacement, with direct governance of this process of incremental change by residents themselves. At both the neighborhood and block scales, the Equity Hubs work took shape as a checkerboard of different formal and aesthetic conditions. Formally, the grid and the cul-de-sac would overlay and co-exist: the former would open up dead ends while the latter would fold a series of ponds into the fabric of the city. Aesthetically, we expressed variety through the recombination of varied building shapes. And programmatically, we celebrated accidental adjacencies—between water and land, and new and existing—as places where reciprocal relationships of care for land, animals, and people can take hold. To picture this, I  drew a collective kitchen at the core of a city block, where back-facing porches open onto the collective ground of the CLT. It is at moments like these that the social,

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FIGURE 11.4 Resilient

Equity Hubs Scenarios. Image: Janette Kim/Urban Works Agency With Clare Hačko.

sensory experience of reciprocity comes together with the economic, systemic conditions of redistribution. After RBD wrapped up, I worked independently on a series of speculative drawings to better understand how these multiple commons can take shape in the space of the city. I defined a series of scenarios showing a range of potential ownership and governance arrangements. Each defines various scales and extents of the climate commons, with the understanding that they can co-exist with one another. I have written more extensively about this work elsewhere but will give an overview here to visualize how these boundaries can take shape.18 The first ownership scenario addresses the community land trust approach, showing collective ownership of the land and private ownership. Though the tidal ponds are not integrated here, the ground shows foundation walls that raise houses up above the floodplain and reach out into collective land to capture and direct water. The second scenario is a community-owned solar project, showing an array of solar panels that reach across multiple buildings owned by allies

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of the cooperative. This infrastructure can feed neighborhood generators, collective kitchens, and workshops, and provide income for community owners ­community-owned solar. The third scenario shows the use of crowd-funding platforms to fund real estate investment, sometimes for as low as a $500 contribution. Here, a local investor could buy a smaller, flexible fragment of a larger structure, and still build up equity over time. The fourth scenario shown here imagines the potential impact of the public trust doctrine, which defines government ownership according to the location of the mean high tide line. Here the corners of city blocks would be ceded to city ownership to rematriate land to Indigenous ownership and care. What starts to emerge here is the realization that climate commons can be larger and smaller than the city boundary or the individual lot line. While the Community Benefits District can redistribute wealth at the territorial scale, across municipal boundaries, alternative property arrangements like these can rework lives and livelihoods at the scale of social presence. They can extend property to more expansive forms of ownership by shaping the very presence and experience in which alternate claims land are made. The coexistence and overlay of extended, contracted, accidental, and intentional commons do not in itself assure a just, equitable, or enduring approach to climate risk. Enduring inequities require differentiated approaches, restructuring the commons to selectively include the unwilling and extend power to those long excluded from this right. In both the space of the city and the structure of its institutions, commoning can draw lines of inclusion to previously disinterested subjects or can release those at greatest risk from overbearing entanglements. Win-Win

How would such a variegated commons govern itself? How could it engage in the “always contested” and “open political process” defined by Stavrides as core practices of commoning? What would enable such a commons to garner consent if not consensus? Methods of deliberation used by intentional communities— self-governance methods such as a “do-ocracy” or full consensus models—rely on more established lines of trust and direct action among its members than is often possible in tenuous assemblies like the ones I have described across the San Leandro Bay.19 At a more extended scale, government-led commons like a GHAD or community-led districts like CBDs might offer structures for representation, but their bureaucratic methods often foreclose meaningful engagement and further reinforce entrenched injustices. Somewhere between do-ocracy and bureaucracy, deliberative techniques for an accidental commons must offer a particular ability to translate across the different languages and values held by diverse members. I designed a board game called In It Together as a deliberative tool that can facilitate just such a process.20

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FIGURE 11.5 

I n It Together in play at the Higher Ground Leadership Workforce, an after-school program based at the Madison Park Academy Elementary School. Image by Sara Lafleur-Vetter for the All Bay Collective

In It Together was a prompt and product of the collaborative process our design team organized with municipal and community-based partners. We formed a Project Working Group with community-based organizations East Oakland Collective, Oakland Climate Action Coalition, Scraper Bike Team, Merritt College Brower Dellums Institute for Sustainable Policy Studies, Planting Justice, HOPE Collaborative, East Oakland Building Healthy Communities, and Repaired Nations; as well as municipal agencies at Oakland Planning, the City of Alameda, Bay Area Rapid Transit, the Port of Oakland, East Bay Regional Park District, and East Bay Municipal Utility District.21 Through an iterative sequence of steps, I  brought nascent elements of the game designed by my students at California College of the Arts to spark dialog and inform our design proposal.22 Our partners filled out blank stakeholder cards to express their priorities, which ranged from affordable housing, job-training, and permaculture gardens to community land trusts and tax revenues for infrastructural investments. They debated the selection and placement of such adaptation moves on a common map. Then, building on these findings and further play tests with my students, I created a first full version of In It Together and hosted play at an East Oakland Collective constituent meeting, East Oakland after-school program, a public Challenge event, and the Oakland Coliseum BART station, as well as within our own design team. I have also since developed a second version of the game, which gives players different kinds of currency and the power to change

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the rules of the game, and have played it with planners, policy-makers, and students.23 I have hosted game play with public audiences, in both versions, over 20 times since 2018. In It Together stages role-play among members of the accidental commons and enacts scenarios in which rising seas can either magnify or diffuse conflicts among them. Five players—a Mayor, Tenant, Homeowner, Developer, and ­Animal—each have a unique set of goals across five potential categories: Environment, Mobility, Profit, Sociability, and Equity. The Animal and Developer, for example, have a singular focus on profit and environment, respectively, while the Tenant and Homeowner pursue a unique mix of equity, sociability, and profit goals. The Mayor is most empathetic, with goals across all categories. Players accomplish their goals by placing related Adaptation Tiles within particular territories across the board, which depicts a generic urban Estuary. Once played, tiles can be lost in floods that can rise up to 66 inches in one round, depending on the roll of a dice. Where the territories overlap, one player’s moves affect each other’s, thus simulating Beck’s “canopy of risk” in real time. Single family homes that benefit the Homeowner player, for example, can detract from others’ Environment and Sociability goals. In one session, the Mayor rejected the Tenant’s request for more affordable housing by investing in a tech campus for unicorn companies. The Mayor lost trust by favoring economic growth over equity, but did raise enough revenue to protect the waterfront. In another case, the Developer convinced other players to migrate downtown to encourage the Mayor to handle flood-protection in one centralized place. This was made possible by an unlikely alliance with the Animal, who was eager to take over the adjacent wetlands. In yet another instance, the Tenant convinced the Homeowner to pump water out of low-lying areas just long enough for them to build a community-owned solar farm. This created enough income in future rounds that the Tenants could waterproof the entire neighborhood. In It Together makes it acceptable, even fun, to disagree. It makes the distinct interests of each player visible and sets up an agonistic process of debate among them as a productive site for collaboration. In some cases, conflicts have revealed unexpected alignments. In one Project Working Group meeting, for example, participants initially described the Arrowhead Marsh, which sits between Bay Farm Island and Deep East Oakland, as a barrier between the players’ territories. As play proceeded, however, they started to use the Marsh as a common ground for all, cultivating habitat, investing in flood protection, and creating pathways across the neighborhood. In other cases, though, agreement has proved far more elusive. The tension between development and gentrification was especially unresolvable, whether in play sessions, among our design team, or with our collaborators. The game remained agnostic, presenting the Mayor’s tech campus as equally viable to the Tenant and Homeowner’s incremental approach. The game invites players to collectively weigh trade-offs of

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FIGURE 11.6  In It Together. Image by Sara Lafleur-Vetter for the All Bay Collective.

these options across growth and equity, reach and scale. While the Challenge’s format favored quick consensus to yield a satisfying design proposal, the game kept debates live. In this regard, In It Together amplifies agonistic debate as a key technique of commoning, embracing Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism as one that defends the “ineradicable pluralism” that refuses to exclude “legitimate opponents.”24 The game resists the call towards urgency that Kyle Powys Whyte warns of and holds space for more probing and systemic approaches to come forward. Where immediate consensus isn’t possible, the role-play structure of the game helped build empathy across different interests. This was especially evident when East Oakland residents played the City of Alameda, and vice versa, as many voiced a new understanding of the other’s unique challenges. A shift was also evident across disciplinary boundaries. In one case, an environmental planner initially insisted that building a centralized levee system would maximize their team’s return-on-investment. When we played the game a second time, this person pursued other options more playfully, finding unexpected benefits from a more distributed, and locally controlled, series of adaptation moves. The game translates across divergent perspectives as well as incommensurate disciplinary languages. One of the biggest challenges for accidental commoners of San Leandro Bay was the need to reconcile competing visions of the city as an economic engine and as a just city. From Deep East Oakland to Alameda Island, and from housing rights activists to coastal engineers, the analytic frameworks and rhetorical techniques of equity were incommensurate with managerial and market logics of urban governance. ‘Soft’ judgments such as ethical arguments, strategies of influence, and lived experience were often discounted in

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comparison to ‘hard’ evidence of economic and ecological performance. Efforts to anchor community-generated wealth were discounted because they could not scale up or generate revenue, even though economic growth was not the goal for many. By framing equity-oriented policies, hydrological infrastructures, capitalintensive buildings, and multi-species landscapes within the same space, In It Together makes such logics commensurate. Across mismatched value systems, their relative merits are debated by the players through negotiation, trades, and favors. Their exchange is negotiated through play. Governing the accidental commons requires the ability to recognize and translate across differences to yield a productive, agonistic process of debate. With our partners, In It Together did this by recognizing conflict among members of the collective. It staged role play and played out alternate scenarios to test how potential alliances and unanticipated strategies might emerge. But even if conflict lies at the heart of commoning, what are we to make of the zero-sum nature of games? Does gaming prevent a culture of abundance and cooperation from thriving? Indeed, In It Together airs differences by defining resource limits. Players need money to employ Adaptation Tiles on the board, and some players receive more money than others. (To reflect real life inequities, the Developer and Mayor player receive twice as much money as the Tenant and Animal player each round.) Such limits, in turn, stage tradeoffs that spark creative play. At the same time, however, the structure of In It Together also puts the very question of cooperation and competition into play. Players can decide at any time whether to play competitively or cooperatively. The game leads to three potential scenarios. In a lose-lose outcome, everything floods. In a winlose outcome one player completes their goals before any of the others do. And in a win-win outcome, all players together accomplish goals across all five types of goals. As seas rise and new alliances form, players can see when they retreat into self-interest or feel motivated to work together. Even more importantly, the second version of In It Together enables players to change the rules of the game, thanks to the addition of a second form of currency: votes. The Tenant and Animal player receive twice as many votes as the Developer and Mayor. Players can put a policy up for vote at the end of each round. Some erode away at zero-sum logics. For example, while only one Adaptation Tile can typically be placed within a limited number of “Vacant Lots” (to represent land scarcity), the “Density” policy encourages players to stack tiles in the same location.25 Players no longer have to choose between a water treatment plant and urban agriculture, but could imagine a compost wonderland. Similarly, though players’ territories are typically distributed throughout the board, the “Territory” policy allows players to move territories. This not only enacts a managed retreat scenario, but also allows players to share resources collected in those locations. In both cases, the game not only illustrates tradeoffs; it facilitates their very erasure. One can replace scarcity with abundance.

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In It Together works across unlikely and discordant members of the accidental commons, catalyzing agonistic debate and facilitating the creation of alternative rules for governing the collective. The game begins with a somewhat pragmatic stance, asking how members of the commons work against existing constraints, from the dynamics of real estate speculation to contemporary policies for affordable housing. It also invites its players to see where breaking the rules is sometimes the only option. It tests the line between pragmatism and resistance. In It Together therefore understands the constraints of economy and ecology not as water-tight systems designed to optimize economic growth and ecological sustenance, but as politically defined conditions open to ethical debate, scrutiny, and revision. Conclusion

To return to our opening question: how can we empower the unifying, responsive, and liberating nature of the accidental commons while disempowering its burdensome, extractive, and exploitative tendencies? Doing so demands reciprocity within communities, as well as a more nuanced redistribution of risk among them. Resilient Equity Hubs reimagines policy mechanisms and property arrangements to extend responsibility for the commons to those who have traditionally escaped accountability. In turn, it retracts and reinforces protections for those already overburdened by heat, floods, rent, and labor. Recovering the accidental commons also requires the capacity to forge consent amidst deeply contested points of view. Climate risk may be common, but it is certainly not monolithic or equitable. Resilience thinking missteps here, extolling the commonality of risk and the opportunity for mutual benefits without recognizing that resilience is a privilege for some and a burden for others.26 As a tool for agonistic debate, the In It Together game facilitates self-governance in the accidental commons in its playful embrace of difference and contestation. Understandably, some might find the idea of negotiating with the very agents of racial and social injustice—the very forces that generate risk in the first place— abhorrent. In the context of San Leandro Bay, this might mean putting clear-cut logging corporations and insurance adjusters aside for a moment, and focusing on for-profit developers and elected officials eager to turn what one agency representative called an “underperforming neighborhood” into a catalyst for urban redevelopment. Are these “legitimate opponents” in Mouffe’s characterization? As I have argued here, the careful inclusion of such climate constituents is not only pragmatic because of the power and influence they hold, but also necessary to enforce accountability from them. Even more importantly, the question of whether to engage or resist is the very work of commoning. In this way, the deliberative process of the accidental commons can forge an ever-evolving and evercontested form of consent among diverse participants—a kind of consent that is ever more elusive in the ever-churning, accident-prone seas of a warming planet.

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Notes 1 Ulrich Bech and Mark Ritter, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publicatoins, 2013). 2 Ibid. 3 Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2020), 6. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Naomi Klein, “Introduction: Blank is Beautiful,” Essay. in The Shock Doctrine (Henry Holt and Co., 2007); Stavros Stavrides, “An Urban Archipelago of Enclosures,” Essay in Common Space (London: Zed Books, 2016). 6 Kyle Whyte, “Against Crisis Epistemology,” in Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, eds. Brendan Hokowhit, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Steve Larkin, and Chris Anderson (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021). 7 Ibid. 8 Stavros Stavrides, “An Urban Archipelago of Enclosures,” Essay in Common Space (London: Zed Books, 2016), 32. 9 Ibid. 10 The All Bay Collective team was composed of AECOM, CMG Landscape Architecture, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, and the Urban Works Agency at California College of the Arts, in association with Silverstrum Climate Associates, Skeo, Moll de Monchaux, and David Baker Architects. The Urban Works Agency team involved in design and curriculum in the challenge was composed of Janette Kim and Neeraj Bhatia with Liz Lessig, Cesar Lopez, Namhi Kwun and Carlos Serrano. Partnering community-based organizations consisted of East Oakland Collective, Oakland Climate Action Coalition, Scraper Bike Team, Merritt College Brower Dellums Institute for Sustainable Policy Studies, Planting Justice, HOPE Collaborative, East Oakland Building Health Communities, and Repaired Nations. Partnering government organizations consisted of Oakland Planning, the City of Alameda, BART, the Port of Oakland, East Bay Regional Park District, and EBMUD. California College of the Arts students involved in the initial conceptualization of the game and its final fabrication are Shahad Alamoudi, Marwan Barmasood, Georgia Came, Denisse Correa Guerra, Ally Foronda, Eric Fura, Francisco Garcia, Jessica Grinaker, Fathmath Isha, Lori Martinez, Jennifer Pandian, and Sabrina Schrader. Special acknowledgements go to Claire Bonham-Carter, Kris May, Paul Peninger, Stephen Engblom, Marquita Price, and Greg Jackson for their involvement in developing the game. 11 Coastal and groundwater findings were provided by All Bay Collective members Kristina Hill and Kris May. 12 Hannah Norman, “These Bay Area Cities Saw the Biggest Rental Price Spikes over the Past 2 Years,” San Francisco Business Time, January  10, 2019, www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/10/bay-area-rental-price-spike-oakland-menlopark.html; Kathleen Richards, “The Forces Driving Gentrification in Oakland,” East Bay Express, December 4, 2019, www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-forces-­ driving-gentrification-in-oakland/Content?oid=20312733&storyPage=2; and Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 13 Amanda Brown-Stevens, “Emma Greenbaum and the Resilient by Design Teams,” Resilient By Design Bay Area Challenge, Unpublished Manuscript, 2019, www. resilientbayarea.org/book; and The Estuary Commons: People, Place, and a Path Forward, Unpublished Manuscript, May  31, 2018, www.resilientbayarea.org/ estuary-commons.

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1 4 The Estuary Commons, 74 and 103. 15 Abstract of “Land Value Capture and Justice” paper by Susan S. Fainstein, Retrieved from www.lincolninst.edu/publications/conference-papers/land-value-capture-­justice. See Susan S. Fainstein, “Land Value Capture and Justice,” in Value Capture and Land Policies: Proceedings of the 2011 Land Policy Conference, eds. Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012). 16 Susan S. Fainstein, “Land Value Capture and Justice,” in Value Capture and Land Policies: Proceedings of the 2011 Land Policy Conference, eds. Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012), 38. 17 See The Estuary Commons: People, Place, and a Path Forward, Unpublished Manuscript, May 31, 2018, 149, www.resilientbayarea.org/estuary-commons. 18 Janette Kim, “Shearing Property: Replatting Climate Risk,” in Perspecta, Atopia, eds. Alexis Hyman, Melinda Agron, Timon Covelli, and David Langdon, vol. 54 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 44–53. 19 See Neeraj Bhatia and Antje Steinmuller, “Spatial Models for the Domestic Commons: Communes, Co-living and Cooperatives,” Architectural Design 88, no. 4 (July 2, 2018): 12–127, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad.2329. 20 In It Together design credits are: Janette Kim/Urban Works Agency and the All Bay Collective for the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge. 21 For more on the collaborative decision-making process and community-based organizations’ concerns about resilient planning, see Janette Kim, “Modelling a Critical Resilience: Board Games and the Agonism of Engagement,” in Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City, eds. Dale Leorke and Marcus Owens (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021). 22 I taught a seminar at California College of the Arts in 2018, in which students created and tested initial game ideas, and then fabricated the final version of the game. 23 I will describe version 2 of the game here unless noted otherwise. 24 Chantal Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism. Reihe Politikwissenschaft,” Political Science Series 72 and 15 (2000). 25 This feature was inspired by the “Delirious D.C.” board game designed by Mira De Avila-Shin and Galen Pardee in a studio I taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 2016. 26 For critiques of resilience thinking in climate adaptation planning, see Janette Kim. “Modelling a Critical Resilience: Board Games and the Agonism of Engagement,” in Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City, eds. Dale Leorke and. Marcus Owen (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021).

Bibliography Bech, Ulrich, and Mark Ritter. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications, 2013. Bhatia, Neeraj, and Antje Steinmuller. “Spatial Models for the Domestic Commons: Communes, Co-living and Cooperatives.” Architectural Design 88, no. 4 (July  2, 2018): 12–0127. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad.2329. Brown-Stevens, Amanda, Emma Greenbaum, and the Resilient by Design Teams. Resilient By Design Bay Area Challenge. Unpublished Manuscript, 2019. www.­ resilientbayarea.org/book. The Estuary Commons: People, Place, and a Path Forward, Unpublished Manuscript, May 31, 2018. www.resilientbayarea.org/estuary-commons.

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Fainstein, Susan S. “Land Value Capture and Justice.” In Value Capture and Land Policies: Proceedings of the 2011 Land Policy Conference, edited by Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012. Kim, Janette. “Modelling a Critical Resilience: Board Games and the Agonism of Engagement.” In Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City, edited by Dale Leorke and. Marcus Owen. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. Kim, Janette. “Shearing Property: Replatting Climate Risk.” In Perspecta, “Atopia.”, edited by Alexis Hyman, Melinda Agron, Timon Covelli, and David Langdon, vol. 54, 44–53. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Klein, Naomi. “Introduction: Blank Is Beautiful.” Essay In The Shock Doctrine. New York: Metropolitan Books-Henry Holst and Co., 2007. Mouffe, Chantal. “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism.” Reihe Politikwissenschaft, Political Science Series 72 (2000): 2–17. Norman, Hannah. “These Bay Area Cities Saw the Biggest Rental Price Spikes Over the Past 2 Years.” San Francisco Business Time, January 10, 2019. www.bizjournals.com/ sanfrancisco/news/2019/01/10/bay-area-rental-price-spike-oakland-menlo-park.html. Richards, Kathleen. “The Forces Driving Gentrification in Oakland.” East Bay Express, December 4, 2019. www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-forces-driving-gentrificationin-oakland/Content?oid=20312733&storyPage=2. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2020. Stavrides, Stavros. “An Urban Archipelago of Enclosures.” Essay in Common Space. London: Zed Books, 2016. Whyte, Kyle. “Against Crisis Epistemology.” In Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhit, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Steve Larkin, and Chris Anderson. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021.

12 DESIGN AND JUSTICE Power and Place Bryan C. Lee Jr.

On August 16th, 1960, a letter was sent to the new owner of a small, red, twostory house in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. The letter was addressed to “nigger” Roderick Woodard, my great-grandfather. He was a 46-year-old postal clerk who had purchased the house less than two weeks prior, on August 4th. The anonymous note warned Roderick to move out of the house and neighborhood, or he would face continued threats of violence. During the two weeks preceding the writing of this letter, he encountered thirteen burning crosses on his lawn, a myriad of racist graffiti on his home, and multiple attempts by his neighbors to torch his residence. Undeterred, he continued to prepare his home, fixing broken windows or painting over racist graffiti as quickly as they arrived. As he saw it, he had moved to the neighborhood to better himself and his family but found himself on the receiving end of a hostile welcome. According to the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), the neighborhood Roderick moved into was assigned a C grade. This federally created institution established the value and creditworthiness of communities through a color-coded neighborhood appraisal system segregated along racial and class lines. This system effectively and maliciously assigned a fabricated value to a neighborhood’s assets and, by proxy, the neighbors’ value. The explicit goal was to separate those deemed “worthy” from those deemed “undesirables,” a surface-level euphemism that did little to hide the contempt of a nation towards Editor’s note: Rather than being supported or validated by bibliographic texts, this contribution is built upon the author’s life experience, which accounts for a direct and profound comprehension of the themes at hand. It is also supported through a sample images dossier, with the work of Colloqate Design in direct dialogue with the text’s arguments. DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-15

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its most disinherited populations. According to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which used the HOLC maps, this area was considered a middling neighborhood at the time, with little to no infiltration of Black or brown people, an aging housing stock, and a lack of reliable utilities. Despite the realtor’s assertions that the neighbors had no objections to Roderick’s presence, the seller reportedly put the property on the market as a revenge sale, threatening to integrate the neighborhood by selling to a Black family as they left the area. This was not uncommon, but it was exhausting for many Black families who sought to move to the suburbs and were met with similar hostility and obstruction while trying to locate safe, affordable housing during this time. In America, the benign malice of structural racism such as this is intended to be exhausting; this is the point. As a chronic condition that parallels the very real and visible violence of the time, it supports a preordained social order. It cloaks itself in the rule of law to obfuscate the origins of its power. Obfuscating power’s origins only serves to spread and strengthen its hold on the material realities of marginalized people. My family’s experience is merely a microcosm of the structures that govern our society. Within weeks of buying a new home, my great-grandfather was confronted with the power of compounding injustices engrained in our nation’s social, political, economic, and spatial systems. A historically violent and racist social system viewed him as less than worthy of dignity and humanity. A political system ensured that these beliefs made their way into racialized housing covenants and eventually into the federal policy of “redlining,” an economic system that incentivized the differential valuation of land and property based on race and class, and finally, a segregated spatial system that used the boundaries of land and property to enforce and subsequently validate all other structures and systems. These systems’ enduring legacy continues to influence cycles of systemic inequities and long-standing inter-communal traumas. These interconnected systems have shaped the modern American landscape and run counter to all notions of justice on which this country claims to be founded. The United States is a nation born of these contradictions of ideals; it is the successor to a long line of colonial powers committed to constitutional freedoms and all of their inherent rights, yet the land of Indigenous people and the labor of Black bodies stabilize it. The socio-political idea of America is shaped by the assumption that the land and labor of others are its rightful possession and that a nation’s violent actions were and are a “necessary evil” to propel its ongoing manifest destiny. Emancipation in the United States marked the beginning of the strategic political untethering of Black lives and labor from the structural systems of exploitation that fueled the economic and social outputs of the South to that point. It was done less out of a moral obligation to free the enslaved and more

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as a last-ditch effort to cripple the South’s ability to maintain its social and labor infrastructure in the face of an ongoing war. It is well established that the end of the civil war was partially brought about, if not entirely, by a massive general strike (1862) that sent enslaved people fleeing to the North in droves, which the Emancipation Proclamation capped. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued only as a last resort, following unsuccessful attempts to resolve the issue of slavery in other ways. The exploitation of land and labor played a defining role in developing multiple forms of economic and physical slavery in the United States. In the South, slavery was a cornerstone of racialized agrarian capitalism, with enslaved people providing labor for crops such as cotton and tobacco. In the North, class-based industrial capitalism thrived, with workers providing labor to produce goods in factories. After the end of the Civil War, the Union embarked on a massive undertaking known as Reconstruction. This undertaking included a colonization plan for the South; the seizure and redistribution of abandoned lands; and granting of voting rights, free healthcare, and education to formerly enslaved people. Reconstruction lasted until the end of the 19th century. However, after the war, the Union decided to provide a path to redemption for the South’s crimes against the nation. As a result, many reparative actions taken during Reconstruction were nullified. This included the implementation of policies such as segregation and discrimination designed to impact Black people and other marginalized communities. While the North tried to appease the South, the South developed and deployed a (un)expectedly vicious implementation of Black codes throughout the South. Since southern power structures no longer had the power to force labor to work the land, they used these newly formed laws to compel Black people to a kind of reminiscent servitude by controlling and restricting the land and spaces they could engage with, effectively criminalizing Blackness in public space. It only took three months for many former slave states and some new western states to implement these codes. The Black codes helped to solidify a racist system of segregation that spread across the country through law and violence. This system, later known as Jim Crow, became increasingly entrenched in our politics and places. Nation-building required the maintenance of these oppressive ideologies to construct a unified narrative that concealed the atrocities they perpetrated. It necessitated that society memorializes those beliefs in the architecture that formed this new world and ultimately actively sought to eradicate all forms of alternative cultures and histories. These consolidated narratives served to consolidate power, and as a result, the formwork of America continues to be shaped by them to this day.

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These stories are intended to validate the worldview of the privileged and powerful. They establish a society’s collective values, lending credence to the construction of space and place as monuments to the hubris of dominant cultures. To maintain its position, the structures of power in the United States have spent generations crafting a housing system that reinforces the notion that some people are more deserving of housing than others, keeps people on the verge of poverty, and ultimately validates the homelessness crisis as a feature rather than a flaw. Based on a narrative of a lesser humanity, we built neighborhoods, housing, roads, stores, and schools that reinforced segregation and locked it in as the de jure law of the land. We convinced ourselves that some people are more dangerous than others. On that basis, we set out to build the world’s most lethal policing system, which feeds into the world’s largest prison industrial complex—a system maintained by the expansion of prisons and jails designed to deprive marginalized people of their social and economic potential. We reassured ourselves that our presence on this land had a minimal impact on the environment, thereby providing the moral and ethical blind spot needed to permit the extraction of resources from the land, the deforestation of forests, and the construction of buildings that consume most of the world’s energy production. Simply, control of societal narratives establishes contrived evidence of a godgiven superiority with which power seeks to align itself. These narratives influence and are influenced by our culture, providing logic to the form and purpose of the built environments we live. The legitimacy of power in society stems from how culture and the built environment stay the same or change over time. Future physical worlds will directly result from society’s capacity to respond to power collectively and consistently in a way that invalidates ceded power. We know that control of the built environment, including land and derivatives, is the most effective means of centralizing power. As a result of governing the material realities dependent on the land, those in power establish policies and procedures that govern social behavior and find it much simpler to shape societies and cultures in their image. The purpose of spatial design justice is to reflect on design as an act of protest, responding to and shifting power in service of the people. In the face of institutions and actors who use architecture, landscapes, and planning as instruments of oppression, to protest is to have an unyielding faith in the power and potential of a just society. It is fundamentally about a collective hope for a broad liberation embodied in the places and spaces that hold the story of our existence. At its very best, spatial design reflects this collective pursuit of justice. Design Justice Image Sample Dossier

All images copyright Colloqate Design.

FIGURE 12.1 Black Land Matters, From Blights Out, 2017. More at www.blightsout.

org.

FIGURE 12.2 Paper

Monuments, Installing Poster of Dorothy Mae Taylor, 2017. More at www.papermonuments.org.

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FIGURE 12.3 Paper

Monuments, Monuments, Memorials or Public Art Public Proposals by Kids, 2017. More at www.papermonuments.org.

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FIGURE 12.4 Paper

Monuments, Monuments, Memorials or Public Art Public ­Proposals by Kids, 2017. More at www.papermonuments.org.

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FIGURE 12.5 Paper

Monuments, Monuments, Memorials or Public Art Public Proposals by Kids, 2017. More at www.papermonuments.org.

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FIGURE 12.6 Paper

Monuments, Desire Standoff, poster, 2017. More at https:// www.papermonuments.org.

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FIGURE 12.7 Paper

Monuments, Commemorating Poster of Dorothy Mae Taylor, 2017. More at www.papermonuments.org.

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FIGURE 12.8 Paper

Monuments, Claiborne Ave. poster, 2017. More at www.papermonuments.org.

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FIGURE 12.9 Paper Monuments, Installations, 2017. More at www.­papermonuments.

org.

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FIGURE 12.10 Blights

Out Gathering, From Blights Out, 2017. More at www.­ blightsout.org.

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FIGURE 12.11 Blights Out Gathering, From Blights Out, 2017. More at www.blight-

sout.org.

FIGURE 12.12 Commodified

Housing is Class Warfare, From Blights Out, 2017. More at www.blightsout.org.

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FIGURE 12.13 Development

Without Displacement, From Blights Out, 2017. More at www.blightsout.org.

FIGURE 12.14 Decent

Housing Fit for Human Needs billboard, From Blights Out, 2017. More at www.blightsout.org.

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FIGURE 12.15 Mapping

2019.

Historical Narrative for Martin Luther King Jr. Exhibition,

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What Is Power If Not the Ability to Assert One’s Will?

The potential power of any system is directly bound to the singular power of individuals within a system. In its neutral state and without a clearly articulated structure to extract and harness that energy towards a purpose, power is neither inherently good nor bad. Power, specifically in social systems, is the capacity and potential to assert one’s will on people and/or places in the shortest amount of time, at the least expense, and with the most gained. Power is further amplified by systemic privileges, which can exert an exponential force in favor of one’s will. Societies, as they are historically structured, require hierarchy as the foundational framework to channel and direct power—a caste system of some sort, whether defined by racial, religious, or economic qualifiers. The frameworks of hierarchy and all the infrastructure supporting it are constructed to validate the principles by which society will control its people, places, and, subsequently, its potential power. These frameworks give power a pole and direction. Systems of hierarchy require systems of governance that define who is tasked with maintaining the system (democracy, monarchy, or autocracy) and how the system will distribute power (feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, or totalitarianism). These systems provide a foundational belief about the order of society and serve as a collective contract. The most straightforward way for society to build power is to extract life, labor, or land in its pursuit. These three elements are inextricably linked in a cycle of potential and service, in which land acts as a fulcrum of power to balance the capitalist compulsion to labor to live and to live a fulfilling life until the point at which labor is once again required. Power gained through terrorizing communities, exploiting labor, or extracting from the land serves to expand the time and distance between an individual’s required labor. Our social lives and labor revolve around the cultivation of land, consistently renegotiating the loads and forces pulling us in and out of balance. In the delta of imbalanced systems, power is harvested from individuals and redistributed to those in control of those systems. An infinite number of permutations and modifiers alter the system’s outcomes from its inception. It’s important to acknowledge that societies shift the frameworks of hierarchy to gain or retain dominant power structures. Once a society’s logic toward power is defined, it can initiate a process of forced segregation, self-segregation, or de jure segregation. Segregation is a method of quarantining a community’s counterpower, resulting from prolonged power extraction from those who have been devalued within the system. A system’s decisions must be confirmed for it to function. Setting up validation processes serves to justify the system and the individuals within it, essentially reinforcing the pathways for power to be harvested and disinherited communities within the system to be discarded. Systems that disenfranchise

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certain people gradually lose their overall potential, and the organization of counterpower inevitably leads to its demise. Spatial power is then about making, remaking, and keeping power through the cultivation of land and its products, like minerals, crops, and buildings. Removing or controlling people’s movements and extracting land is the foundational violence of white supremacy, meant to decouple one’s humanity from the places that shape it and create the conditions for labor to be an individual’s only remaining depreciable assets. Because of this, our society gives people who have taken over lands through political, social, capitalist, or violent means moral value and authority. Power is an elusive particle wrapped in an ever-complicating structural system. The purpose of systems is to provide protection for the core directive of power (consumption and expansion) and to provide reasonable assurance that the outcomes of a system will stay within its anticipated outputs. If a system can provide some obscurity, then disruption, justice, abolition, or liberation become exponentially more challenging to achieve. Disruption and justice are remedies within the context of established systems. Abolition and liberation are a complete withdrawal from those systems. All bear the scars of history, but abolition and liberation demonstrate that cessation and repair are essential components of any new state, necessitating the remediation of soils bloodied by our history. Design Justice must be concerned with the informal relationships that shape disinherited people’s patterns, habits, tendencies, and rituals and the places they are frequently juxtaposed. Unpacking these relationships reveals the built environment’s role in maintaining systems of dominance and oppression and the modes of coping and adaptation imposed on disinherited communities. As a result of an adaptation of cultural space, the informal relationships communities develop in a given location leave a distinct imprint on the spatial imaginary of cultural communities. Collocation of class, race, and/or culture is both a symptom and a feature of systems. Intentional alignments of people, place, and space are required for any society to function. Still, it is the byproduct of discarded people and places in established systems that adapt and mutate to create new complex worlds outside of a scripted paradigm. Communities are forced to survive a prescribed dystopia by any means necessary. These adaptations are frequently viewed as a threat to be violently regulated. Still, depending on one’s perspective, they can be viewed as the desired path leading us to a liberated future. Identifying the cause of common cultural spatial collocation is a profound step in reconciling society’s ideals with its brutal realities. People are forced to change their habits when oppression and injustice are institutionalized and then manifested in our buildings. They generate new patterns; they make informal use of formal architectural precedent, thereby altering the cultural meaning of and relationship to space.

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Architecture is a fundamentally optimistic practice. Willing a building into being requires, when done well, a tremendous amount of negotiation between an existing condition and a vision for a materially significant positive impact on a future condition, so while Design Justice is anchored in the belief that for nearly every injustice in this world, there is an architecture, landscape, or plan that has been designed to perpetuate that injustice, Justice seeks to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture as a tool of oppression and sees it as an opportunity to envision radically just spaces centered on the liberation of disinherited communities. At the root of housing, transportation, and economic injustice are remnants of redlining and conventions that continue to extract wealth and codify structural or de facto segregation. At the root of unjust policing is a prison industrial complex sustained by spaces that extract human dignity and economic potential from disinherited people in the name of profit. At the root of environmental racism is the extraction and exploitation of land in direct opposition to the people on the land. The force of these issues is often invisible, but they are not insurmountable. I find myself at odds with a profession that, in large part, believes architecture’s role is both too large to be concerned with the plight of communities most in need yet too small to address structural injustice at the root of that need. The profession has perfected a process for design that amplifies the excess of those with means while turning a blind eye to those without. In its truest form, the built environment is a documentarian, a witness of inequality and injustice. The language we use to tell the story of a place reveals our values and exposes our collective biases. Architects, planners, and urbanists are responsible for interpreting and translating the ongoing conversation between the sustaining cultural interactions of place and the architectural language of place. The dialogue between culture and place exists throughout architecture’s history. It is said the term “story,” referring to the level of the building, is simply a contraction of the word history and is said to be derived from the narrative carvings at the doors and windows of buildings throughout the history of civilization.

PART III

Postface

13 MAKING THE PUBLIC–COMMONS Marcelo López-Dinardi

This book was preceded by a project titled Making the Public–Commons (MTP–C). The project consisted of an installation, an exhibition, and a conversations marathon. MTP–C was motivated by the ambition and need to elaborate our position towards the making and building public–commons, primarily through an act of appearance and conversation much required in the cultural context where the project originated in College Station and Bryan, Texas. It was a proposition and an open question appealing to transitional thinking for our role as architects and architectural education. The project emerged during some of the isolating stages of the Covid-19 pandemic with the hopes of creating an intense and plural engagement of subjects and themes associated with and in search of a commons sensibility. MTP–C relied mainly on direct dialogue and embodied engagement, two crucial forms of impact in our contemporary culture beyond quantitative metrics. It proposed and promoted dialogue and conversations around topics of—but not limited to, how and what constitutes the public and the commons and why it is critical to appear in public today as we continue to battle the isolating impact of the global pandemic. Almost a year later, the discussion of public–commons continued to evolve through various classes and informal encounters. However, my engagement with the questions of public and commons started around 2014 through a short text on the book Promiscuous Encounters (GSAPP Books, 2014). I continued to elaborate on these issues through my work with A(n) Office and primarily through my architecture studios in schools in the northeast of the US and later in Texas, where it became a more pressing concern. While in Texas, I  developed architecture studios represented in the digital book An Agenda for Bryan-­ College Station, Texas (www.bcsagenda.info), exploring broadly the themes that DOI: 10.4324/9781003349785-17

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shaped MTP–C. Making the Public–Commons was not intended to become a publication or any other document beyond its online digital existence. However, the urgency and opportunity of a commons framework prompted me to further develop the premises for an architecture from public to commons—a transitional and relational thinking that significantly expanded the scope of the original installation, exhibition, and conversations marathon. Installation and Exhibition It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance— something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves— constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.   To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. Hanna Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958

The installation for Making the Public–Commons comprised three distinct elements corresponding to layered ideas. The first element is a table and a seat to serve as hosts for the conversations marathon. The tables aspire to seat a multitude, constructing or bridging dialogues. The second element is distance, not entirely social distance, but the varying distance of the Rio Grande River width. An equivalent distance exists in the Architecture Quad space from north to south at Texas A&M University, where the project occurred. The third element is a composite of two large-scale photographs and the table’s frames that act as support and bridge. Together, the combined elements appeal to our public–commons, a shared river, culture, and ecology, replicating the river’s width and bringing it closer to us in an attempt to make visible some of the realities of the border region a few hours away yet with significant impact in our daily lives on campus. The large-scale photographs appear here to give wide publicity to the image—and landscape accompanying a walk over the Rio Grande between two

Making the Public–Commons  259

cities. Seeing the river crossing through the eyes of those who use it in their daily lives could bring clarity and grounding to the experience of walking between the north and south of the continent. The installation, a conversation and dialogue space, a bridge, and a seat at a table bring the river’s distance close to us and invite us to walk from side to side between north and south or between east and west. Looking through the photographs or engaging in conversations may give us ideas about what it is to live together in the world and what it is to become public and commons. The installation was conceived by Marcelo López-Dinardi. The photographs are by Karla Padilla (Texas A&M University M.Arch.’ 22), taken on Friday, April 16, 2021, on a round trip between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in the US-Mexico border. The installation team included Mariana Garcia Rendon, Arianna Ramirez, Evelyn Ringhofer, and Elizabeth Scamardo. The installation included additional assistance from Nathan Gonzalez, Jim Titus, and volunteers. Conversations Marathon

The conversations marathon was held on Friday, April  23, 2021, from 9:00 a.m. to 7:37 p.m., non-stop, in the outdoor-patio level of the Langford Architecture Center at Texas A&M University during a day of thunderstorms—the reason we moved the installation from the Architecture Quad to the patio level. Conversations were held under the themes of institutions, commoning, landscapes, justice, measures, cooperation, water, ecologies, language, and appearance. All participants of these conversations were asked to offer a 15-minute presentation followed by a 40- to 45-minute conversation with in-site or online guests and me. The conversations spanned time zones, territories, and time periods from the 16th century to today. But they also transgressed, albeit briefly, a mental space, particularly for the organizer. As a performative act on a ten hours event, the conversations allowed for a temporary journey, a trance, hypnotic state after hour two of direct attention and conversation engagement. The discussions were video-recorded, given the nature of the format, and to allow further viewing by others (www.mtp-c.info). Making the Public–Commons was conceived, designed, and organized by Marcelo López-Dinardi and partly funded by the Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts of Texas A&M University thanks to a Pandemic Innovative Arts Grant.

260  Marcelo López-Dinardi

FIGURE 13.1 Making the Public–Commons, Installation, Architecture Quad, Texas

A&M University, April 2021. Photo Marcelo López-Dinardi

Making the Public–Commons  261

262  Marcelo López-Dinardi

FIGURE 13.2 Making

the Public–Commons, Installation, Architecture Quad, Texas A&M University, April 2021. Photo Marcelo López-Dinardi

Making the Public–Commons  263

264  Marcelo López-Dinardi

FIGURE 13.3 Making

the Public–Commons, Installation, Architecture Quad, Texas A&M University, April 2021. Photo Marcelo López-Dinardi

Making the Public–Commons  265

266  Marcelo López-Dinardi

FIGURE 13.4 Making

the Public–Commons, Installation during Conversations Marathon, Langford Building Patio, Texas A&M University, April 2021. Photo Mariana Garcia Rendon

Making the Public–Commons  267

FIGURE 13.5 Making

the Public–Commons, Installation during Conversations Marathon, Langford Building Patio, Texas A&M University, April 2021. Photo Mariana Garcia Rendon

CONTRIBUTORS

Emanuel Admassu is an assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP. He is a found-

ing partner, with Jen Wood, of AD—WO, an art and architecture practice based in New York City, and by extension, between Melbourne and Addis Ababa. He is also a co-founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. His art, design, and teaching practices operate at the intersection of design theory, spatial justice, and contemporary African art. The work meditates on the international constellation of Afrodiasporic spaces. Most recently, he has been analyzing the socio-spatial identities of two urban marketplaces: Kariakoo in Dar es Salaam and Merkato in Addis Ababa. Admassu has previously taught at RISD Architecture and Harvard GSD. AD—WO’s work was featured in the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art. Their installation focuses on the immeasurability of Black spatial practices in Atlanta and the Atlantic. He holds a B.Arch. from the Southern Polytechnic State University, and an MS in Advanced Architectural Design and Advance Architectural Research from Columbia GSAPP. Nandini Bagchee is the Director of the Master of Science in Architecture

­ rogram at the Spitzer School of Architecture (CCNY, CUNY) and Principal P of Bagchee Architects. Her research focuses on activism in architecture and the ways in which ground-up collaborative building practices provide an alternative medium for the creation of public space. Nandini is the author of a book on the history and impact of activist-run spaces in New York City, Counter Institution: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side (Fordham University Press, 2018). Nandini’s design work and writing has been published in The New York Times, Interiors Now, Urban Omnibus, and the Journal of Architectural Education. She

Contributors  269

is the recipient of grants from the New York State Council of the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Graham Foundation. Her research-based architectural work involves an engagement with grassroots organizations such as South Bronx Unite, Interference Archive, the Loisaida Center, and the Laundromat Project in New York City. coopia is a cooperative experiment committed to doings through learnings and

inhabitings towards the socio-environmental trans-formation of the territory, as well as autonomous, anti-capitalist-patriarchal-colonial presents. It began in 2019 and is currently distributed between Bogotá and Ciudad de México. coopia articulates transversal models of collaboration and self-managing formats of practices oriented towards collectives and singularities committed to autonomous socio-environmental trans-formations of the territory. Our ethos is based on four principles: cooperate, repeat, (re)distribute, and refuse.

Amira Hanafi is a poet and artist working with language as a material. She makes systems and games to prompt and play with different kinds of language. Publishing and performance are fundamental tactics. Polyvocality is both a theme and a strategy in her work, which has been shown widely online and in offline spaces around the world. Amira is the author of the hybrid genre books Forgery and Minced English, a number of limited-edition print works, and several works of electronic literature, including A dictionary of the revolution, which won Denmark’s 2019 Public Library Prize for Electronic Literature. Amira holds US and Egypt passports and has made her home in both countries. Andrés Jaque is Dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Jaque is the founder of the Office for Political Innovation, an architectural practice based in New York and Madrid, Spain, and has been teaching advanced design studios at Columbia GSAPP since 2013. His architectural work includes ‘Plasencia Clergy House,’ ‘House in Never Never Land,’ ‘TUPPER HOME,’ ‘ESCARAVOX,’ and ‘COSMO, MoMA PS1.’ The Office for Political Innovation was awarded with the Silver Lion to the Best Research Project at the 14th Venice Biennale, the Dionisio Hernández Gil Award, London Design Museum’s Designs of the Year Selection, Mies van der Rohe Award (finalist), and Architectural Record’s Designers of the Year Selection. Their publications include PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society, Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Dulces Arenas Cotidianas or Everyday Politics; and their work has being included in the most important media, including A+U, Bauwelt, Domus, El Croquis, The Architectural Review, Volume or The New York Times; and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art MoMA, London Design Museum, MAK in Vienna, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, RED CAT Cal Arts Contemporary Art Center in Los Angeles, Z33 in Hasselt,

270 Contributors

Schweizerisches Architektur Museum in Basel, the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine de Paris, the Hellerau Festspielhaus in Dresden, and Princeton University SoA. Janette Kim is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work focuses on the intersection between ecology, social equity, and the built environment. Janette is Associate Professor of architecture and Co-director of the Urban Works Agency at California College of the Arts and Founding Principal of the design practice All of the Above. Her work has been awarded by the Graham Foundation, AIA San Francisco, and the Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship, and has been featured in NPR’s ‘Brian Lehrer Show,’ Artforum, Architect, Frame, GOOD, and the featurelength documentary, The Grove. Janette was also Assistant Professor at Syracuse University from 2015–2016 and Adjunct Assistant Professor from 2005–2015 at Columbia University, where she directed the Applied Research Practices in Architecture initiative and the Urban Landscape Lab and served as founding editor of ARPA Journal, a digital publication on applied research practices in architecture. Janette holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University. Bryan C. Lee Jr. is an architect, educator, writer, and design justice activist. He

is the Founder/Design Principal of Colloqate Design, a nonprofit design practice based in New Orleans, USA. Lee is a founding organizer of the Design As Protest Collective and Dark Matter University. He led two award-winning architecture + design programs for high school students through the Arts Council of New Orleans (local) and the National Organization of Minority Architects (national), respectively. He is the National NOMA South VP and has earned multiple awards and fellowships including the United Artist, 2023. In 2018, he was named Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and Colloqate Design was the Youngest firm to win the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices award in 2019. He obtained a 2021 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award.

Marcelo López-Dinardi is an assistant professor in the Department of Architec-

ture at Texas A&M University. He is interested in the scales of design, the role of the public and commons in architecture, and the practice of architecture as research and expanded media. His work as a partner of A(n) Office was exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016. López-Dinardi has written, among others, for The Avery Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, Domus, Art Forum, ARQ, Materia, and Bitácora Arquitectura. Before joining Texas A&M, he taught at Barnard+Columbia, NJIT, Pratt Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, RISD, and the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (PUPR). He obtained a Bachelor of Architecture from the PUPR (cum laude) and a Master of Science

Contributors  271

in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices for architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. He was recently selected as a 2023-2024 Fellow for Bridging the Divides: Post-Disaster Futures with the project Cemented Dreams: Material and Ecological Stories in Puerto Rico, by CENTRO, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, a Mellon Foundation funded program. Elis Mendoza is a doctoral candidate in architecture history and theory. She

works in the intersection between built space, technology, and human rights with a special focus in post-conflict cities. Her dissertation traces a history of architecture experimentation within the incipient humanitarian government of the 1970s—that runs parallel to well-established architectural histories of development and technology, and that became central in the conceptualization of today’s modern refugee and internally displaced people. She has presented her research at the Guatemalan Court for Vulnerable Victims in 2016, she has developed research on the criminal negligence of rapacious post-disaster building practices in Mexico City after the 1985 and 2017 earthquakes, and is currently conducting research for the Executive Commission for Victims in Mexico. Elis is a Paul Mellon Centre Junior Fellow (2019–2020) and a PLAS Fellow (2019–2020) at Princeton University, and has been a Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives Fellow (2018), a Lassen fellow at Princeton University (2015), and a CONACYT Fellow 2012–2014. Her work has been supported by the Soros Foundation, UN Women, SEP and CONACYT. Before coming to Princeton, Elis earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a master’s degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in architecture at Columbia University, where she received the CCCP award for high academic attainment.

Marina Otero Verzier is head of the MA Social Design at Design Academy

Eindhoven. In 2022 she received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of digital infrastructures. From 2015 to 2022, she was the Director of Research at HNI, where she led initiatives focused on labor, extraction, and mental health from a post-anthropocentric perspective. Previously, Otero was Director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, Columbia University in New York. She was a co-curator at the Shanghai Art Biennial 2021 and was in the Artistic Team of Manifesta 13 Marseille. At the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Otero curated ‘Work, Body, Leisure’ for the Dutch national pavilion. As part of the After Belonging Agency, she was the Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. Her latest exhibition, ‘Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains,’ is presented at the Galeria Municipal do Porto (2023). Otero has taught at RCA London, ETSA Madrid, Columbia GSAPP, HEAD Geneva, and Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

272 Contributors

and lectured at universities worldwide. She has coedited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Unmanned (2016–20), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), After Belonging (2016), among others. She studied at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid, and GSAPP. In 2016, Otero received her Ph.D. at ETSA Madrid. Fernando Portal is an artist and researcher exploring the intersection of design

and politics. He has collaborated extensively with artists and high-profile cultural institutions in Europe and the Americas in the development of curatorial, editorial, and performance-based projects related to the memory of counterhegemonic practices in architecture and design, and to the development of selforganized cultural and communal spaces. Portal trained as an architect at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC). He received an MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University in 2012. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar working on the dissertation ‘Dismantling Modernism: the Disappearance of the Technical Object as an Agent of Development,’ and he serves as Associate Professor and Director of the interdisciplinary research center Núcleo Lenguaje y Creación at Universidad de las Américas in Santiago, Chile. Linda Schilling Cuellar is an architect and urban designer. She has recently

exhibited at the São Paulo Architecture Biennial (2022), Driving the Human Festival in Berlin (2021), and the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial (2020). The 2020–2021 GSAPP Incubator cycle prize recipient with the proposal Extractopia started AHORA alongside Claudio Astudillo Barra to work with the new landscape modeled by extraction economies. AHORA looks at extraction economies, with particular attention to the ones in Chile, and asks what will happen after it is all gone to imagine possible futures led by local communities in the face of ecological degradation. She is an instructor at Universidad de las Américas in Chile, leading the research project “Territories in conflict: a counter-narrative of national architecture in areas of environmental conflict.” She holds a B.Arch. from the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and an MSc in architecture and urban design from the (GSAPP) Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Pelin Tan is a sociologist, art historian, and researcher on transversal methodol-

ogy, alternative pedagogies, and conflict territories. She is a professor at Batman University, Turkey; Senior Research Fellow at Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Boston/US; and researcher at the Architecture Faculty, University of Thessaly, Greece (2021–2026). She has been an associate professor of architecture at Mardin Artuklu University, Turkey (2013–2018), and a visiting associate

Contributors  273

professor at the University of Cyprus (2018); visiting associate professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2016). She was Research Fellow of Hong Kong Design Trust (2016–2017); Research Fellow at The Japan Foundation, Tokyo (2012). Tan is a member of the curatorial board of IBA Stuttgart 2027. She also served as a guest curator for the I-DEA archival project at Matera 2019, European Capital of Culture, Italy. Tan was named the Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College in New York. She completed her MA in art history at Istanbul Technical University (2003), and a Ph.D. thesis on the concept of ‘locality’ in socially engaged art practices at ITU (2010). Tan was a postdoc fellow at the Art, Culture and Technology program, School of Architecture and Planning at MIT (2011). Luciana Varkulja is an architect, urban designer, educator, and researcher. She

received her Master of Architecture from GSAPP at Columbia University and her bachelor’s degree in architecture and urban design from FAUUSP at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She is the founder and principal of uma architecture & design, a design and research practice, collaborating with projects in Latin America, Africa, and the US. Varkulja’s research is focused on how architects and designers can learn from food systems and forestry management practices, engaging in a more sustainable approach during the design process through a responsible choice of materials, labor conditions, and a deeper knowledge of the supply chain. She has held teaching positions and is a visiting juror at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design in D.C., Columbia University/Barnard College in New York City, Cal Poly Pomona, and USC School of Architecture in Los Angeles. In addition, Luciana is a senior lecturer at Otis College of Arts and Design. Acknowledgments

This book came at a critical juncture and would not have been possible without timely support from numerous colleagues and friends. I wrote this book’s proposal during my faculty semester leave in Spring 2022. I am totally indebted to Ignacio G. Galán for supporting me in various ways by listening to the initial ideas of this book project, encouraging me to pursue it, and later thoughtfully offering feedback. I  am particularly grateful to Brittany Utting, who encouraged me to prepare the book proposal and shared insights about the process and continued a conversation throughout. I am obliged to the external reviewers who pointed out important aspects that significantly improved the framing of this project and gave me the confidence to develop it. Thanks to Alessandro Orsini for inviting me to present developing ideas for this book in his seminar at the GSAPP in the Spring of 2022. I thank Matt Shaw for his work formatting the manuscript texts in its latter stages. Finally, at Routledge, I thank

274 Contributors

Commissioning Editor Lydia Kessell, Editorial Assistant Jake Millicheap, and their team for their support and work during the book’s process. I want to thank the Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts of Texas A&M University for giving me a Pandemic Innovation Arts Grant at the end of 2020 to achieve the project that preceded this book and from which its ideas evolved into this format. Thanks to the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research from Texas A&M University for providing me a Publication Support Grant. Special thanks go to Andrés Jaque, who graciously accepted my invitation to write the preface, and a generous one, for this book. I am incredibly grateful to all the contributors, Pelin, Amira, Marina, Fernando, Nandini, coopia, Emanuel, Luciana, Linda, Elis, Janette, and Bryan, who kindly joined me at different stages of this journey, shared their work, and supported this project. I am thankful to Gabriel Piovanetti for always jumping on the ship for a creative contribution, this time on the book’s cover. This book project would not have been possible without a caring and supportive group of friends near and far during these tumultuous times; your constant warmth and love kept me going; thank you. And lastly, I am immensely grateful to my day-to-day life partner, sounding board and critic, Tyrene Calvesbert, who has given me space, supported, and accompanied me in every step of this process.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. 3D printing, advances 79, 83 3D technologies (Forensic Architecture) 198 abstraction-socialization, impact 118 Abuelas, impact 200 – 1 Abya Yala (revolt/resistance) 13, 117, 121; commoning practices 125; experiences 128; life, reproduction 124; socioecological experiences 126 accidental commoners, challenges 227 – 8 accidental commons 214; governance 228 active participation, forms (development) 216 actual being, renunciation 146 – 7 Addis Ababa: ghebbi 139 – 44; leasehold rights, allowance 142; masterplan, proposal 142; speculation, realities 142; urban renewal program 142 Adhocracy exhibition (Athens) 11 Admassu, Emanuel 139 Adorno, Theodor 116 AECOM 217, 220 AFAD see Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency

Africa: neocolonies, transition (European negotiation) 143; self-governing communities 142 – 3 African 6, 37, 38, 40, 141, 143, 151n4, 268 African Americans, land ownership 96 African people: enslavement 6 – 7; relocation 37 Agenda for Bryan-College Station, An (development) 257 – 8 Agrarian Reform (Chile) 76 Aguilar, Yolanda 200 Aj’Quij (spiritual guide), leadership 200 Alarcón Ferrani, Cristian 197 alcance práctico 130 Al-Fawar camp (Palestine) 27, 28 Allende, Salvador: economic policies, imposition 75 – 6; socialism experiment 12 – 13; technical objects, series (government design) 73; Unidad Popular government, overturning 71 – 2 al masha (communal land), term (DAAR usage) 22 alphabet, representation 38 – 9 Alto Los Vilos 186; Informal Settlement 187

276 Index

Amazon Rainforest: disputes/agendas 153, 155; logging activities, impact 153 American boardwalks, Ipê wood (usage) 160, 163 – 4, 164 American people, loyalty 42 Andean Pact (1976) 76 anti-Black enclosures 139 anti-Blackness, morphing 150 anti-Black violence, ubiquity (response) 147 anti-capitalist commoning 21 anti-colonial autonomies, recognition 127 anti-government/anti-austerity protests 54 anti-literacy laws, passage 40 Antú (black and white television), development/distribution 75, 77 architect, role 64 architectural care, practices 64 architectural coloniality 121 architectural commons knowledge, appearance 7 architectural institution, edifice (relationship) 64 architectural practice, outmoded forms (impact) 65 architecture: engagement 9; forms, rethinking 1 – 2; modulation/ institutionalization 120; practice 22; practice/business, disentanglement 65; practice, optimism 254; production 7; public to commons architecture 4; understanding 51 Architecture of Appropriation: HNI labeling 60; making, annotation sessions 59, 61 Architecture of Appropriation project 58 – 9 Architecture Quad 258, 259 archives, construction 60 ARCI label, founding 77 Áreas de Manejo y Explotación de Recursos Bentónicos (AMERB) 181, 184 Arendt, Hannah 4, 9, 258 Aronowitz, Stanley 119 Arrowhead Marsh, description 226 association mode 126 asymmetrical spatialities 123 asymmetries 10 Atacama salt flat 178

Atelier Bow-Wow 54 Atlanta forests, fugitivity sites 150 Atlas of Commoning, An (ARCH+ journal) 11 authority, position (impact) 63 – 4 autonomous doings, horizons 128 – 30 autonomous dwelling structures, support 30 autonomous relationships, weaving 117 autonomous space, participation 114 autonomy (autonomies): common of autonomies 124 – 8; defining 124, 127; integral autonomy 127 – 8; prefiguration, relationship 124 avocado industry, development (Chile) 179 Awan, Nishat 203 Bagchee, Nandini 93 Bahia, desertification 167 Baker, David 220 Bakhtinian dialogism 34 Bakhtin, Mikhail 33 – 5 Barandiarán, Javiera 180 bare-ground ecohistories, recognition 191 Barrios Aguilar, Iris Yassmin Barrios Aguilar 207 Baschet, Jéromê 122 baselining, commoning practices (relationship) 189 – 91 Baselining Nature 189 Battle of Adwa (Ethiopia victory) 143 Bauhaus: Influencia en el diseño Chileno exhibition, objects exhibition 87, 88 being common, social process 22 being-in-public, politics (equivalence) 9 being, modes 127 belonging, circle (opening) 216 Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) 113; Entramados Comunitarios y Formas de lo Político 114 Bense, Max 78 Berann, Heinrich 146 beyond-against 125; 117 – 18; formulation 115 – 16; situation 127 Bilbao Effect 55 – 6 bilingual communities, code-switching (prevalence) 36 biomes, predatory exploitation 170 biopower 2

Index  277

Black Land Matters 237 Black Marxism (Robinson) 146 – 7 Blackness: formation 146; thinking 150 blackness, contrarational beauty 150 Blackness sites 13 blackouts, impact 215 Black Panthers, free breakfast program 24 Black people, freedom (Jefferson belief) 40 Black spatial intonation 139 Black studies, critical engagement 147, 150 Black visual intonation (BVI) 139 Black voters (disenfranchisement), oral/ written examinations (usage) 40 Bleich, David 35 Blights Out Gathering 246 – 8 Bloch, Ernst 127 Bloomberg, Michael R. 162 BMW Guggenheim Lab (Berlin) 54, 55; environment, connection (difficulty) 56 boardwalk: American boardwalks, Ipê wood usage 163 – 4, 164; Coney Island Boardwalk 161, 162; forest, relationship 162 – 171 bodily fragmentation 3 bonding, force 117 Bonsiepe, Gui 77 – 8 borders: active renegotiation 29 – 30; consideration 114 Brand, Dionne 146 brasa 155 Brazil: extraction 162; forest management 160, 160; forest management plans, conflict 165; Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), impact 167; IBAMA data 165 – 6; National Development Bank (BNDES), cheap loans 167; restoration initiatives 167, 170; supply chain investigations 165; timber extraction 165; timber market, illegality 166; volumetric yield coefficient (CRV) (coeficiente de rendimento volumétrico) 160 bridge, action 258 Brown, Wendy 3 Buen Vivir, 64 building (action), primary practice (question) 65 – 6

buildings: construction 236; property/ ownership, entanglement 65 built environment: control 236; neoliberal destruction 24 business ontology, presence 2 Cadmus, or, A Treatise on the Elements of Written Language (Thornton) 38 Caffentzis, George 21 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) 221 Calveiro, Pilar 201 campesinos, interaction 114 Campt, Tina 146 “canopy of risk” 226 capital: accumulation 121, 130; global accumulation 121; goods, project organization (Chile) 78 capitalism: impact 118; making, cessation 122 capitalist entities, wealth transfer (enactment) 198 capitalist rationality, logic 124 Castro-Gómez, Santiago 121 catachresis, offering 146 Cátedra Ambulante 54 CEH see Truth Commission Center for Electronic Technology and Quality Control (CETEC) 78 Centre Pompidou Mobile 54 Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) 118, 210n11 Chatterton, Paul 128 Cherokee, dispossession 147 Chicago Boys 73, 191 Chicano identity, consideration 114 Chile: active environmental stewardship, demand (increase) 179 – 80; Agrarian Reform 76; Áreas de Manejo y Explotación de Recursos Bentónicos (AMERB) 181, 184; avocado industry, development 179; Bauhaus: Influencia en el diseño Chileno exhibition, objects exhibition 88; constitutional process 190 – 1; Constitutional Proposal, Defensory of Nature (Defensoría de la Naturaleza) 191; consumption-based attraction 88; coup d’état 71, 72, 78, 79, 87; deindustrialization

278 Index

75 – 7; deindustrialization process 73; desalination, usage 180 – 1, 184 – 6; economic conditions, dismantling 76; environmental distortions 179 – 80; Environmental Impact Assessment System (EIA) 180, 184; images, channeling 79 – 86; industrial design, commoning practice 77 – 9; industry nationalization policies 75; IRT, industry nationalization (relationship) 74 – 5; Laguna Conchalí Wetland Fenced 184; livelihoods, change 178 – 9; Los Pelambres evapotranspiration zone 186; lost industrial design objects, reanimation 71; Los Vilos, landmark locations (satellite image) 185; materials, channeling 79 – 86; military Junta, impact 76 – 7; mineral extraction operations, extension 184; Minera Los Pelambres (MLP) 181, 186 – 9, 188; Miner’s Water rights, claim 178 – 80; National Geology and Mining Service (Servicio Nacional de Geología y Minería) (SERNAGEOMIN) 186; objects, exhibition/property 87 – 9; Playa Amarilla Beach 182 – 3, 185; private property, consideration 191; privatization 75 – 7; projects, categories (organization) 78; record player design report (1972) 79; socialism experiment (Allende) 12 – 13, 73; unearthing, history 188; unearthing/reversing 178, 187 – 9; Water Code 179, 189 – 90; water cycle, exhausting 178; water cycle, reversal 187 – 8; water market, impact 179; water rights, ownership (question) 180; water scarcity 185 – 6 Ҫinar Camp (Diyarbakir) 28, 29 Cinco Debates (Segato) 205 circle of belonging, opening 216 city 4 – 5; concept (examination), common lens (usage) 5 City as Commons, the (Harvey) 4 City of Asylum 42 City Plaza Hotel (Athens) 25, 29, 30

civil rights infringements (support), laws/ regulations/documents (usage) 40 Civil War, cessation 235 class/race/culture, collocation 253 climate change: non-consensual nature 216; stakeholders 217 climate crisis, impact 189 climate-related disasters 215 climate risk, redistribution (tool) 214 code-switching, prevalence 36 co-existing communities, thresholds 29 coffee industry expansion, impact 166 – 7 cohabitation 23 Cold War 141 – 2 Colectiva Jalok U 207 collaboration mode 126 collections, construction 60 collective action, requirements 24 collective imagination, tempering 141 – 2 collective ownership model, creation 96 – 7 collective structures 24 Colloqate Design 14, 253n1 colonial cartography, algorithmic enclosures 147 colonial domination, patriarchy-capitalism (amalgam) 115, 127 colonial expansion 36 coloniality, experience 127 colonial project, development (underpinnings) 6 – 7 colonial societies, material legacy 5 colonization, machine 120 Colorado Radio and Televisão do Brasil S.A., acquisition 76 color-coded neighborhood appraisal system, segregation 233 comer (eat) 124 – 8 commercial space, premium 99 Commodified Housing is Class Warfare (Blights Out) 248 common: construction 115; criticisms 10; decision-making modes 126 – 7; space 23 common goods 12 – 13, 71; creation 73 – 4; distribution 190 – 1; object design, relationship 83 Common Goods project 73, 78, 83; component 79; conceptualization stage 87 commoning: practices 125; shared beliefs, relationship 216; space, intifadas (relationship) 22; spatial discourse

Index  279

21 – 4; trans-local commoning practices, occurrence 26 – 7 commoning practice 26, 77 – 9; baselining, relationship 189 – 91; impact 29; infrastructure, connection 30 common knowledge, service 24 common lens 5 – 9 common of autonomies 124 – 8 common-pool resources (CPR), collective management 8 common resources 125 commons 9 – 10; accidental commons 214; communities, impact 22; concept, importance 21; conceptualization 24 – 6; constitution 4 – 5; creation/ reproduction, social process (impact) 22; differences 6; Estuary Commons (Resilient Equity Hubs) 218, 219; forms 141; reasoning 7; resources, involvement 22; roleplay, staging 226; scale (scales) 10 – 14, 21, 24 – 30; win-win situation 224 – 9 commons-based framework, variables (documentation) 8 – 9 Commons-Institut 190 – 1 common space: consideration 4; relational/relative connection 23 communalidad (communality), term (coinage) 125 communicative infrastructures (Martin), underestimation 10 communitarian, meaning 125 – 6 community (communities): concepts 103; counterpower, quarantine 252; economy, ethics 24; equity 99; impact 22; network, spatial scale (impact) 25 – 6; term, usage 102; we, fluidity 99 – 102; we, relationship 99 – 106 Community Benefits Agreements, formation 221 Community Benefits Districts (CBDs) 221 – 2, 224 community land trust (CLT) 222; agenda, ambiguity 110 – 11; collective ground, porches (facing) 222 – 3; foundational undertakings 110; holding 219; model 13, 96 – 9, 102 community-owned solar project 223 – 4 community-owner solar farms, holding 219

concealment, spatial practices 37 conceptual walls 53 Coney Island Boardwalk 161, 162; Dreamland Park 161 conflict, architecture historian specialization 202 conflicting ground 153 conflicting values, negotiation/ resolution 24 Conger Moss Guillard Landscape Architecture 217 con-movernos 115 – 17, 130; invitation 117 Consejo Nocturno 117, 129 conservation, sense 60 – 1 conventional logging 162, 165 conventions, remnants 252 – 3 conversing, books (usage) 38 – 9 con-vivir 116 – 17 cooperation mode 126 cooperative urbanism 97 – 8 Cooper Square Community Land Trust (Cooper Square CLT) 97 – 8, 102 Cooper Square is Here to Stay (banner) 97 coopia 13, 113; questions 128 CORFO see Normalization Management (CORFO) corridor, construction 26 counter-worlds, creation (desire) 67 Court for High-Risk Crimes trial 207 Court of Conscience Against Sexual Violence, organization 201 crisis thinking, impact 216 critical spatial practices 52 croplands, increase 170 cultural expression, space (preservation) 220 – 1 cultural hegemony 39 cultural movements, inventions 36 Dansette (Bermuda model) 71 De Angelis, Massimo 22 decay, actions 66 – 7 Decent Housing Fit for Human Needs (Blights Out) 249 decentralized knowledge sharing (global network), creation (attempt) 57 decision-making processes, articulation 8 Declaration of Independence 38 Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR) 22; tent gathering 28

280 Index

Deep East Oakland: link 217 – 19; urban history 221 defeat/victory, internal affair 147 deforestation, coffee industry expansion (impact) 166 – 7 deindustrialization (Chile) 75 – 7; process 73 de jure segregation, process (initiation) 252 democracy movement, ethos (capture/ appropriation) 54 – 5 Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), MVRDV design 61 – 2 dpr-barcelona 11 desalination: environmental violence 186 – 7; plant (Puerto Chungo) 180 – 1; usage 180 – 1, 184 – 6 design: development, emancipation tool 78; justice 233, 236; living, object production (distance) 79; pedagogies/epistemologies, discussion 21; transfer 83 Design Group 79; development 78; images, production/publication/ dissemination 80 – 1 Design Justice, concerns 253 ‘despojo,’ interaction 67 determination, flow reversal 118 developmentalism, impact 197 development, insurrectionary opposition 102 Development Without Displacement (Blights Out) 249 Dheisheh Camp (Palestine) 27; DAAR (tent gathering) 28; workshop, conducting 27 – 8 dialectics, meaning 116 dialects, destruction 39 dialogism (Bakhtin) 33 – 4 Diaz Álvarez, Enrique 200, 201 Díaz Gómez, Floriberto 125 dictatorship 71, 72, 73, 75, 192n6, 209n1 differentials 10 digitally multiplied finance, presence 2 Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) 27, 30 discrimination, forms/applications (usage) 40 displacement: parallel strategy, proposal (Jefferson) 39 – 40; spatial practices 37

disruption, impact 253 diverse economies diagram 23 document, mailing (preparation) 45 doing-against-work, networks (weaving) 123 doings, form 128 – 9 dominance, exploitation (relations) 126 – 7 “do-ocracy” 224 Dorador, Cristina 189 Douglas, Mary 189 Dreamland Park (Coney Island) 161 drip irrigation, usage 179 Dubnau, Jenny 106 dying commons 13 – 14 – 15 dystopia, survival 253 East Coast boardwalks, destruction 162 East New York Community Land Trust 100 – 1 East Oakland Building Healthy Communities 225 East Oakland Collective 225 east-west connective corridor (Guatemala), spatial relationship 205 economic conditions, dismantling (Chile) 76 Economic Development Corporation (EDC), Request for Proposals (RFPs) release 110 – 11 economic qualifiers 252 economic volatility, protection 218 – 19 Edgemere, garden (organizing/running) 98 – 9 edifice: architectural institution, edifice (relationship) 64; maintenance 66 – 7 educated-non-educated binary 5 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 198 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) (Zapatista National Liberation Army) 127 el Buen Vivir 64 Emancipation Proclamation 235 Enclosure or Inclosure Acts (1604) 124 – 5 enemy, material/objective power 147 engagement, architecture form (rethinking) 1 – 2 English language: immigrant assimilation 42; speaking, difficulty 40 – 1; teaching 40; usage 38

Index  281

English Language Unity Act (2019) 33, 43; crowd translation, staging 44 English, speaking (consequence) 39 Entramados Comunitarios y Formas de lo Político (BUAP) 114 Environmental Impact Assessment System (EIA) (Chile) 180, 184 environmental injustice burdens 215 environmental violence 186 – 7 envolver y cocer (wrap and cook) 118 – 24 epistemology of crisis 215 equality (basis), land (impact) 96 Equipo de estudios comunitarios y acción psicosocial (ECAP) 200 – 1 equity: land-based substructure, contradictions 99; land, equivalence 98; rhetorical techniques 227 – 8 Escobar, Arturo 4 Espírito Santo, desertification 167 Estuary Commons (Resilient Equity Hubs) 218, 219, 220, 223 ethical arguments, discounting 227 – 8 Ethiopia: land guarantee 142; legislation, introduction 142; property/ leasehold, slippages 142 Ethiopian’s People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), impact/dissolution 142 Euro-American-based stranglehold 143 Eurocentrism, anti-racist critique 67 European colonizers, fortune-seeking 95 ‘Evanescent Institutions’ 53 – 4 exhibitions, usage 258 – 9 exile, misery 147 existence, precarity 1 – 2 exploitation: dominance, relations 126 – 7; impossibility 119 extractivism 67, 166 Ezidi Refugee Women, corridor (construction) 26 Ezidis camp 27 fabric-made dresses, creation 66 Fainstein, Susan 221 FarBar series 42 Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 234 Federalist Papers 38 Federation for American Immigration Reform (RAIR) 43 Federici, Silvia 2, 7 – 8, 21, 29, 198

Ferreira da Silva, Denise 150 fields of alliances 113 – 18 financial security, guarantee 99 First Export Quality (FEQ) requirements 165 Floating University 11 fluid identities, language (making) 33 FONDART Research Grant 79 food scarcity, precarity 99 forced segregation, process (initiation) 252 foreigners (assistance), books (usage) 38 Forensic Architecture, 3D Technologies 198 forest (Brazil) 155, 160; boardwalk, relationship 162 – 171 Forest is a Completely Woven Underground, A (MattaClark) 154 forest products, project destinations (users) 155 forests: designed projects 171; psychocartographies 204 Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), impact 167 foundations, importance 62 founding documents, English language (usage) 38 Four Community Land Trusts, representation 100 – 1 Franco, Francisco 54 Fraser, Nancy 9 freedom (basis), land (impact) 96 Frei, Eduardo 76 Fresh Direct, land disposition/ dispossession 102 – 3 Friedman, Milton 73 fruit crops orchards (establishment), soil topography (impact) 179 FUCVAM, cooperative housing 129 Fulchirone, Amandine 200 games, zero-sum nature 228 García, Ofelia 36, 41 Gardiazabal Irazabal, Francisco 179 geographical location, language (relationship) 43 Geologic Hazard Abatement District (GHAD) 221, 224 ghebbi (Addis Ababa) 13, 139 – 44; Amharic connotation 141; collection 141; exit 147;

282 Index

multi-scalar infiltrations 142 – 3; study I 140 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 21, 23 – 24, 30 Glissant, Édouard 147 globalization, impact 121 Gonzalez, Nathan 259 goods for popular consumption, project organization (Chile) 78 goods for public use, project organization (Chile) 78 Google Document (screenshot) 34, 35 Google Images search results, composite 86, 86 – 7 govermentality, relationships 53 governance: arrangements 223; city governance 222; cooperative governance 215; direct governance 222; forms 58; land governance 98; self-governance 216 – 7, 220 – 1, 224, 229; systems requirement 252; urban governance 227 governing, decentralization 6 Governing the Commons (Ostrom) 8 Grupo de Diseño Industrial (Industrial Design Group), experiences 77 – 8 Guarani Mbya: inhabitation 171; Tenondé Porã Indigenous Land (Atlantic Forest) 172 – 3 Guatemala: agricultural lands, monocrop conversion 204; capitalist entities, wealth transfer (enactment) 198; developmentalism, impact 197; forensic architecture investigation, production 196 – 7; forest psychocartographies 204; internal conflict 195 – 6; Las abuelas de Sepur (plaintiffs) 195 – 6; Madres de Plaza de Mayo, rights (assertion) 195; Massacre of Panzós 199; military, technologies (usage) 202; Panzós area, conflict 198 – 9; Q’eqchi’ women, rights (reclamation) 195; trauma, memories 197; war/aftermath, investigations 198; women, shawls (usage) 196 – 7; see also Sepur Zarco Guatemala Court for High-Risk Crimes, cases 195 Guatemala Memoria del Silencio report 199 – 200

Guggenheim Bilbao 55 Guggenheim Foundation, impact 56 Guggenheim Museum (Wright) 55 Habermas, Jürgen 9 – 10 Hanafi, Amira 12, 33 Han, Byung-Chul 2 Handroanthus impetiginosus 160 Handroanthus serratifolius 160 Hardt, Michael 9 Hartman, Saidiya 146 Harvey, David 4, 9 Hayakawa, S.I. 42 Hayek, Ghenwa 42 Health Education and Arts (H.E.ARTS) Building: envisionment (Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards) 104 – 5; project 106; report, completion 110 Hecho en Chile (Made in Chile) inscription 75 Heezen, Bruce 146 Helfrich, Silke 190 here-and-now, transformation 123 heterogeneous subjectivities, homogenization 10 Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI): archive, voice (impact) 64; funding 59; leadership, labeling 60; space, creation 63; work 57 – 8 Higher Ground Leadership Workforce, In It Together 224 – 9, 225, 227 high-impact polystyrene (HIPS), injection molding design usage 823 Hills, Kristina 222 historical narrative, mapping 250 Holmes, Rob 185 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) 233 homo oeconomicus, impact 3 HOPE Collaboration 225 H.R. Bill 997 12, 33, 43; text (Google Document screenshot) 34, 35 human activity, damages 19 human collectives, non-human collectives (exchange) 191 Human Condition, The (Arendt) 9, 258 human rights: atrocities (support), laws/ regulations/documents (usage) 40; violations, visibility (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) 88 – 9

Index  283

Hurricane Katrina, impact 214 – 15 Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force 162 IBM Traveling Pavilion 54 identity: language, relationship 43; refusal 116; untruth 116 ILESCO (IRT assembly plant): closure 76 – 7; development 75 Illich, Ivan 118, 120, 130 images: atlas 84 – 5; channeling 79 – 86; Design Group production/ publication/dissemination 80 – 1 Imaginary Party 117 imagined national character, exemplification 37 Immeasurability (work) 146, 150 Immeasurability the Ridge 144 – 5; exhibition view 148 – 9 immigrants, language (erasure) 41 – 3 Immigration Act (1917) 42 Immigration and Naturalization Act (1965) 41 implementation, interest 64 in-between 258 Inclosure Acts (1604) 6 – 7 In Commons (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 111th Annual Meeting exhibition) 11 indigenous/gendered constructed spaces 207 – 8 Indigenous Lands (Terras Indígenas) 155 individual-benefit output 6 Industria de Radio y Televisión (IRT): ILESCO (IRT assembly plant), closure 76 – 7; ILESCO (IRT assembly plant), development 75; industries, nationalization (relationship) 74 – 5; IRT 5VT-2 models (Capíssimo) 832; ownership/program 76; RCA International Ltd., collaboration agreement 74 – 5; tangible assets, sale 77 Industria de Radio y Televisión (IRT) Record Player 72; cases, manufacture 82; design, schematics 82 industrial design, commoning practices 77 – 9 infrastructure, commoning practices (connection) 30

inhabitings 128 – 30 In It Together (Higher Ground Leadership Workforce) 217, 224 – 9, 225, 227; agonistic debate, amplification 227; conflict, recognition 228; differences, airing 228; player interests 226 – 7; role-play, staging 226; structure 228; team, returnon-investment 227; versions, creation 225 – 6, 228 installations, usage 258 – 9 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, history 62 – 3 instituting forms, establishment 63 institutional models 52 institutions: architecture 61; building, Greek tradition 52; decolonization 62 – 3; forms, decay/ruin 66; optimization 62; performing 53; study 57 INTEC, prototype information supply 83 integral autonomy, composition 127 – 8 intellectual mobility, connotation 119 intentional communities, deliberation (usage) 224 inter-dependency 30 – 1 interferences 10 International Labor Organization (ILO) (UN) 77 international ownership, impact 74 International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) 162 intifadas, commoning space (relationship) 22 Invisible Committee 117 Ipê (Handroanthus spp.): American boardwalk usage 163 – 4, 164; boardwalk 155; conventional logging/milling process, ecological/human impacts 168 – 9; exploitation 155; Extraction 156 – 157; life cycle, conflict 165; log, wood equivalence 165 irrigation, usage 179 IRT see Industria de Radio y Televisión (IRT) Italian colonial army, defeat 143 Ixchiol, combative resistance 198 İzmir (Turkey) Kemeraltı Komşu Bostanlar (Kemeraltı Neighborhood Orchards) 26

284 Index

Jaffa, Arthur 139 jagged linguistic landscape, rendering 43 – 5 jagged plurality (Hanafi) 44 Jaque, Andrés 2 Jay, John 38 Jim Crow system 235 jobs, precarity 99 Johnson, Mychal (meeting) 102 Jones, Natasha N. 40 justice: basis, land (impact) 96; design justice 233, 236; impact 254 Kim, Janette 14, 214 King, Jr., Martin Luther (historical narrative mapping) 250 – 251 King, Slater 96 Klein, Naomi 215 knowledge: collective body, production 30; coloniality 121; fields, expertise questions (threat) 8 – 9; open library 26; product forms/ subjects, expansion 7 – 8 knowledge-sharing, institutions (establishment) 215 Kohr, Leopold 130 Kraftowitz, Laura 42 labor: conception 118; exchange, solidarity 30; revolts 118 – 24; wage labor, impact 119 Laboratorio di Quartiere, conception 54 Laguna Conchalí Wetland Fenced (Chile) 184 Laguna Conchalí wetland, impact 181 la mesa (table) 113 la mesa y la olla (gathering) 113 La Moneda Cultural Center 87 land 93; collective ownership 223 – 4; Cooper Square is Here to Stay (banner) 97; enclosure, origin 2 – 3; equity, equivalence 98; exploitation 235; guarantee (Ethiopia) 142; impact 96; protocol 6 – 7; public land, decommodification 111; trust 106 – 11; understanding 96; use patterns, analysis 202, 203 Land and Freedom Army (Kenya) 147 land-based substructure, contradictions 99 land, ownership 222; concepts 106; importance 96

landscape solutionism 185 – 6 Langford Architecture Center (Texas A&M), installation (movement) 259 language: Bakhtinian drama 34 – 5; conceptual relationship, transformation 41; construction, history 43; custody 35; erasure 41 – 3; erasure (Robertson letter) 40 – 1; examination, rethinking 43; flexible practices, usage 37; group, power 3637; group, uniqueness 46; immigrant assimilation 42; learning, ability 38 – 9; making 33; materiality 33 – 7; material, weaving 34; objects, meanings (change) 35; policies, moral/legal framework 36; post-migration shift 41; reconstitution 43; separation, linguistic hierarchy 36 – 7; social practice 36, 37 language (report): alphabetical list 45; mentions, number 46 language act, A (project) 42 – 4 languaging, acts (facilitation) 44 la olla (pot) 113 La Palabra que Aparece (Diaz Álvarez) 200 Las abuelas de Sepur (plaintiffs) 195 – 6; legal team preparation 207; sexual/domestic violence, attention 207; work 197 Las Abuelas (Sepur Zarco), Perrajes covering 196 las hojas (leaves) 113 Laura Segato, Rita 202 learning space 52 – 3 leaves (las hojas) 113 Le Droit à la Ville (Lefebvre) 4 Lee, Jr., Bryan C. 14, 233 Lefebvre, Henri 4, 221 Legal Amazon, deforestation 166 Lenape Lands (spray-painted words) 94 Lenape Lands (spray-painted words) 93 lethal policing system, building 236 life: colonization, wage labor (impact) 119; extraction 252; reproduction 124; revolts, occurrence 123; ritual attitude 130 life-in-place, occurrence 9 – 10 life/market models, socialism proposal 77

Index  285

Lincoln Recovery Center, attention 103 Linebaugh, Peter 197, 208 linguistic disinvention 36 linguistic inventions, material effects 36 linguistic territorialization 43 lived experience, discounting 227 – 8 llegar (arrive), exhaustion/fields of alliances 113 – 18 local environment, response (question) 56 locality: concept, importance 56 – 7; ethics, concept 30 – 31 López-Dinardi, Marcelo 1, 257, 259; Verzier conversation 51 lose-lose outcome 228 Los Pelambres evapotranspiration zone 186 lost industrial design objects, reanimation (Chile) 71 Los Vilos, landmark locations (satellite image) 185 Madres de Plaza de Mayo, rights (assertion) 195 Magna Carta 208 Making the Public–Commons (MTP–C) 257 – 8 Makoni, Sinfree 36, 43 Malcolm X 96 Maldonado, Tomás 78 Map to the Door of No Return, A (Brand) 146 Marañón Pimentel, Boris 118 Marcos, Sylvia 117 – 18 marginalized, yearning 73 Martínez Luna, Jaime 125 Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline, rising seas (shared risk) 217 – 18 Martin, Reinhold 3, 9 – 10 Marx, Karl 119 Masha (shared land) 22 Massacre of Panzós 199 Matamoros, Fernando 116 materials: channeling 79 – 86; production, processes 155 Matta-Clark, Gordon 62, 154 Maury, Matthew Fontaine 146 Mbembe, Achille 57 memory (memories): guarding 57 – 8; overwriting 73 Mendoza, Elis 14, 195 Merkato Indigeno 141

Merritt College Brower Dellums Institute for Sustainable Policy Studies 225 metaphysical system, impact 146 – 7 metropolis, revolts (impact) 129 México, revolutionary hope 114 Mid-Atlantic Ridge 146 Middle Passage 146 militant thought-action 115 Minera Los Pelambres (MLP): copper concentrate, shipping 181; illegal occupation 186 – 7; operation sites locations (satellite image) 188; unearthing/reversing 187 – 9 Miner’s Water rights, claim 178 – 80 Minosh, Peter 38 – 9 Misiones Pedagógicas project (Spain) 54 mita (Inca forced/mandatory labor) 188 Model Villages, relocation 198 Moles, Abraham 78 monetary devaluation, spatialization 143 monocrops, lands (conversion) 204 monoculture tree plantations, increase 170 monolingualism: ideal 38; norm, rarity 36; state, establishment 37 – 41 Moten, Fred 150 mother tongue education, arguments 36 Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards (MHPMCLS) 100 – 1, 106, 110; Health Education and Arts (H.E.ARTS) Building, envisionment 104 – 5 Muerte Al Leviatán: Principios Para Una Política Desde La Gente (Ochoa) 130 Mujeres Transformando al Mundo, creation 201 multilingual communities, code-switching (prevalence) 36 multilingualism, understanding 36 multi-scalar choreographies 2 Munuera, Ivan L. 2 Muscogee, dispossession 147 Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos) 88 MusicVox, basis 75 named languages, presentation 45 National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, interaction 58

286 Index

National Development Bank (BNDES), cheap loans 167 National Geology and Mining Service (Servicio Nacional de Geología y Minería) (SERNAGEOMIN) 186 National Institute for Space Research in Brazil (INPE) project 166 nationalist rhetoric 56 national ownership, impact 74 nation-building 36 – 7; project, expansion 40; requirements 235 nation-state (nation-states): establishment 38; geographical territories, relationship 45; project 3 – 4, 9; violence 120 Naturalization Act (1795) 39 negation, emphasis 116 Negri, Antonio 9 – 10 neoliberal policies, implementation 72 neoliberal rationale, critique 3 Netherlands-based squats 59 New Chilean Song, development 75 New Communites, Inc. 96; planning meeting 95 new enclosures (Midnight Notes Collective) 2 NGO-organized camps, appearance 27 nhandereko (collective way of living) 171 non-demos planetary consciousness, transition 4 non-identity, underground movement 116 non-urban existence 121 Normalization Management (CORFO) 76 – 8 Notes on Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Capitol (Wilson) 39 – 40 Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum 218 – 19 Oakland Climate Action Coalition 219, 225 Obama, Barack 162 objects (Chile): exhibition/property 87 – 9; manufacture (absence), materialization (consideration) 79; selection 83, 86 Occupy movements, impact 21, 24 ontological totality, preservation 146 – 7 Open Veins of Latin America, The (Galeano) 188 oppression, forms/applications (usage) 40 organizations, forms 52

Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), IRT brand production 74 origin story, danger 146 Oromo National Regional State 142 orthography, imposition 39 Ostrom, Elinor 7 – 8, 215 Otero Verzier, Marina 12; López-Dinardi conversation 51 other-architects, right 122 Otranto Urban Reconstruction workshop 54 ownership: buildings, entanglement 65; collective ownership model, creation 96 – 7; international ownership, impact 74; national ownership, impact 74; private ownership 223 – 4; public ownership, private ownership (transfer) 73 – 4; racialized regime 147; two-part ownership model 98 Padilla, Karla 259 paintings, backs (display) 62 Pandemic Innovative Arts Grant 259 Panzós area, conflict 198 – 9 paper monuments 237 – 45 paraontological totality, incantatory refreshment 150 participative communal drawing, usage 201 participatory justice practices, design (impact) 195 passport, danger 146 Patel, Raj 24 pathalogic, paralogic (distinction) 150 patriarchy-capitalism, colonial domination (amalgam) 115, 127 pau-brasil 155 Peninger, Paul 220 Pennycock, Alastair 36, 43 People’s Grocery (Oakland) 24 Petorca Valley, subsistence farming (decline) 179 phonic substance 146 photographs, reenactment 84 – 5 physical spaces 22 physical walls 53 Piano, Renzo 54 Pikpa camp (Lesvos) 29 pilot projects, notion 63 place-making modes 128 – 9

Index  287

place, power (relationship) 233 planetary expansion, machine 120 planetary urbanization, context 4 – 5 Planting Justice 225 Playa Amarilla Beach 182 – 3, 185; jack-up platform (widow-maker), installation 180 – 1 pluralization, strategy 36 pluriverse 128 political autonomy, processes 128 political moment, xenophobic/nativist sentiments 43 political movements, inventions 36 politics, publicity (equivalence) 9 Portal, Fernando 12, 71 Portolan Atlas (Vallard Atlas) 159 Postcapitalist Politics, A (GibsonGraham) 23 power: building 252; capacity/potential 252 – 53; colonial forms, preservation 215; coloniality 121; counterpower, quarantine 252; economies 129; elusiveness 253 – 4; local hub reservation 222; origins, obfuscation 234; place, relationship 233; psychopolitical technologies, implications 2; reduction, revolts (impact) 124; relations, framing 35; relations, problematization modes 127; socio-environmental power asymmetries 127; soft police 121; southern power structures, power (loss) 235; spatial power, impact 252; structures 121 power-being-knowledge, coloniality 121 Powers of Ten (Eames) 2 practice: forms, decay/ruin 66; interest 64; model, reproduction (avoidance) 64 precarity 99; recognition 65 precarization, processes 123 predatory exploitation 162 prisoner’s dilemma-style standoff 215 private ownership 223 – 4 privatization (Chile) 75 – 7 privatization model, predominance 6 – 7 privilege, colonial forms (preservation) 215 proceso de liberación de la Madre Tierra, Uma Kiwe (Mother Earth’s liberation process) 129

PRODES Project 166 Producción y Gestión Social del Hábitat (Social Production and Management of Habitat) 129 production, capitalist relations 122 Production Development Corporation (Corporación de Fomento, CORFO) 74 production modes 115 – 16; problematization 120 ProEnglish (lobbying organization), impact 42 – 3 project destinations, users 155 Project Working Group 225 Promiscuous Encounters (LópezDinardi) 257 property: buildings, entanglement 65; definition, origin 2 – 3; model, predominance 6 – 7; public property, demarcation 93, 95 prophesy, offering 146 proprietary ownership, legal constraints (creation) 106 Prosperity Party, impact 142 prototype: inertia, impact 63; Studio-X cancelation 60 pseudo-intellectualizing 114 public: category, insufficiency 9 – 10; nomenclature 2 – 4; situating, body-politic (impact) 3 Public Art Public Proposals, memorials/ monuments 238 – 40 public-commons 115; discussion, evolution 257 – 8 Public-Commons 14; exhibition (movement) 259; installation, making 260 – 7; making 257 public in architecture, epistemology 3 – 4 public land, decommodification 111 public ownership, private ownership (transfer) 73 – 4 public property, demarcation 93, 95 Publics and Common(s) (Martin) 3 public to commons transition 5 – 6 public trust doctrine, impact 224 pueblos en movimiento 113 Puerto Chungo, desalination plant 180 – 1 Q’eqchi cosmogony, embracing 207 Q’eqchi indigenous women: consequence 197; engagement 14; rights, reclamation 195

288 Index

Queensboro Peoples Space (QPS): Building, Western Queens Community Land Trust envisionment 108 – 9; future, vision 110 Queensbridge Houses, geographic separation 107 questions, strategy (avoidance) 36 race, spatialization 150 racial dialectic 150 racialized agrarian capitalism 235 racialized capitalism regime 96 – 7 racial qualifiers 252 Ramirez, Arianna 259 Raumlabor 11 RBD, cessation 223 RCA Nova 75 RCA Victor (RCA Electrónica S.A.) 74; records, reissuance 77 RCL Sudamericana S.A. 71 ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust 100 – 1 reality, trans-formation 123 reciprocity 216 – 17 Reconstruction, impact 235 Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America 146, 147 – 148 redlining: policy 234; remnants 254 – 5 reforestation programs, carbon emissions compensation 155 relationality, forms (instigation) 52 relational spaces, creation 26 relational thought, impact 1 relations, acknowledgment 65 religious qualifiers 252 remote sensing, usage 198 Repaired Nations 225 reproduction systems, understanding 8 Request for Expression of Interest (RFEI) 98 – 9 Reset: Towards a New Commons (Center for Architecture exhibition) 11 Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge 217 Resilient Equity Hubs (REHBs) 217 – 24; Estuary Commons 218, 219, 220, 223; project 217; proposals 222; shaping 222 – 3 revolts: disruption, occurrence 123 – 4

revolution: basis, land (impact) 96; knowledge 115 re-zoning, insurrectionary opposition 102 ridge 146 Riegelmann, Edward J. 161 right to water (debate) 179 – 80 Rincón Gallardo, Naomi 67 Ringhofer, Evelyn 259 Ríos Montt, Efraín (trial) 200 rituals: instigation 52; relationships 53 Robert, Jean 197 Robertson, Nellie 40 Robinson, Cedric 146 Roosevelt, Theodore 42 rule of law 234 Saint Augustine wind, impact 188 Salazar Lohman, Huáscar 119 Salazar, Memo 106 Salem, Edward 42 salir (get out) 128 – 30 sanctuary cities, banning 43 San Leandro Bay: accidental commoners, challenges 227 – 8; assemblies, description 224; commons 219 – 20; link 217; repair 219 scale, representation 26 Scamardo, Elizabeth 259 Schilling Cuellar, Linda 13, 178 Scraper Bike Team 225 Second Spanish Republic 54 secret histories 123 segregation, method 252 Selassie I, Haile 141 self-actualization 41 self-affirmation, impact 116 self-destructive capitalist system 114 self-destructive tendencies, idea (rejection) 215 self-determination (project), community (importance) 102 self-governance 216 – 17; methods 224; space, preservation 220 – 1 self-managed space, participation 114 self-organization, work/labor structure 24 self-organized camps, appearance 27 self-preservation, sense 60 – 1 self-segregation, process (initiation) 252 self-valorization 128 Sepur Zarco (Guatemala) 14; abuelas, legal team preparation 207; case 195; east-west connective

Index  289

corridor, spatial relationship 205; free labor, providing 199; internal conflict 198 – 200; land use patterns, analysis 202, 203; map, creation (efforts) 206; military outpost, perimetral fence (remains) 204; outpost, military construction 205 – 6; participative communal drawing, usage 201; plaintiffs, stories (contrast) 206 – 7; scorched earth 197; spatial reconstructions, victims 206 – 7; testimonies, recollection 201; trial, indigenous/gendered constructed spaces (relationship) 207 – 8; trial, stage (setting) 201 – 7 settler colonialism, practice 37 sexual violence: CEH findings 200 – 1; international crime, typifying 207; torture, equivalence (argument) 195 – 6 shared precariousness 23 Sherrod, Charles 95, 96 silver extraction, mercury (usage) 188 singularity/multiplicity, subsuming 10 Sistema de Evaluación de Impacto Ambiental (SEIA) 181 slum clearance project 97 – 8 slums, planetary production 121 smooth singularity (Hanafi) 44 social design 22 social determination, flow 127 social fabric, trans-formation 124 social forces, intersections 34 – 5 social movements, inventions 36 social struggles, involvement 113 social trans-formation 119 – 20, 123 social value, fundamental structure (providing) 99 society (societies): collective values 236; forms 52; ideals, reconciliation 253; power, building 253 socio-environmental power asymmetries 127 socio-political domination, impact 36 ‘soft’ judgments 227 – 8 Sogorea Te Land Trust 219 soil topography, impact 179 solidarity, threshold infrastructure (relationship) 30 – 1 Solnit, Rebecca 214, 216 someone/someplace, sacrifice 189

South Bronx Unite 102, 103 southern power structures, power (loss) 235 sovereignty, micro-practices 6 space (spaces): autonomous space, participation 114; commercial space, premium 99; HNI creation 63; homogenization, aesthetic tendency 120 – 1; in-between 28; learning space 52 – 3; life, flourishing 64; racialization 150; relationships 53; self-managed space, participation 114 space-based activism 97 – 8 space-based solidarity practice 23 space of appearance (Arendt) 4 spatial-doings 116; revolts 128 spatial enclosure, struggle 128 spatialities 128 – 30; asymmetrical spatialities 123 spatial motif 128 spatial power, impact 253 spatial practices 21 Spatial Practices 6 spatial production, violent modes 121 spatial reconstructions, victims 206 – 7 spatial scale, impact 25 – 6 spatial social-ecological trans-formation, Eurocentric mode 121 speaking, act (material practice) 34 “Speculators Keep Away” banner 98 Spitzer School of Architecture, design studio (impact) 103, 106 Staal, Jonas 53 stability, impression 51 Stavrides, Stavros 4, 21, 23 – 4, 216, 219, 224 Stereovox, RCA model basis 75 Stono Rebellion (1739) 40 strategies of influence, discounting 227 – 8 structural racism 234 structural violences, patterns 14 struggles, promotion 116 Studio-X 56 – 7, 60 subjectivities, provocation 122 subjugation, histories (appearance) 37 subprime, materiality (locating/ imagining) 150 surroundings, relations (establishment) 53 – 4 Sustainable Economies Law Center 219 Swann, Robert 95, 96

290 Index

Sem ena Worq (wax and gold) 141 Syrian Dom community 27 Tahrir Square, protests 216 Tahtaci, Yildiz 28 Tan, Pelin 12, 21 Tanton, John 43 Taylor, Dorothy Mae (poster installation) 237, 242 Tejidos que lleva el alma 200 – 1 Terner Center for Housing Innovation 217 terra nulius 141 territorial coloniality, argument 121 territorial trans-formation 129 Texas A&M University 258 – 9 Tharp, Marie 146 Thiong’o, Ngūgī wa 142 “This Land is Ours” banner 97 – 8 Thornton, William thresholds infrastructure 21; solidarity, relationship 30 – 1 “Tidal Cities” design (Hill) 222 timber extraction 165 Tischler, Sergio 116 Titus, Jim 259 Tøndevold, Maren Bang 66 totality, challenges 126 – 7 toxic flood water, impact 215 Transcalar Architecture of Covid-19 (Jaque/Munuera) 2 trans (prefix), etymology 119 trans-formation 126; evidence 124; situated efforts 127; social trans-formation 119 – 20, 123; spatial social-ecological transformation, Eurocentric mode 121; territorial trans-formation 129; understanding 119 – 20 translanguaging 36 translation, human right 43 trans-local commoning practices, occurrence 26 – 7 translocal spaces, community operations 22 trust 106 – 11; Western Queens Community Land Trust; see also community land trust Truth Commission (Comisión de Esclarecimineto Histórico, CEH) 199 – 200; finding 200 – 1

Turtle Island, nation-state establishment 38 – 9 two-part ownership model 98 UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design 217 unconscious extraction, threat 13 unearthing, history 188 UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 72 Unidad Popular government, overturning 71 – 2 Unidad Popular Government Program, industrial development plans 75 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) 190 United States: emancipation 234 – 5; formwork 235; ideals, contradictions 234; invading minority, impact 96; sociopolitical idea 234 unity, challenges 126 – 7 universal machine 150 uni-versal tipologies, impact 120 – 1 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) 118 University, The (Federici) 7 unjust policing, root 254 – 5 urban commons 4 – 5 Urban Commons Handbook 11 urban dweller-peasant binary 5 urbanism, modulation/ institutionalization 120 urban-rural binary 5 urban, superiority 121 Urban Works Agency (California College of the Arts) 217 U.S. Congressional Representations, document mailing preparation 45 U.S. Constitution 38 use, fundamental structure (providing) 99 US Incorporated, impact 43 usufruct rights, guarantee 142 vacant lots: chain-link fences, impact 98 – 9; game placements 228 vacant parcels, acquisition 221 Valdebenito Durán, Pedro 77 Vallard, Nicolas 155; Portolan Atlas (Vallard Atlas) 159

Index  291

Varkulja, Luciana 13, 153 vernacular dwellers, axioms (generation) 117 veto, social capacity 117 Via Campesina (international peasant movement) 24 voices, release 37 volumetric yield coefficient (CRV) (coeficiente de rendimento volumétrico) 160 vulnerability, recognition 65 wage labor, impact 119 Walker, Rodrigo 79 walls: change 66; physical/conceptual walls 53; within/beyond 51 war, effects 29 – 30 water: availability, fluctuation 215; cycle, exhausting (Chile) 178; cycle, reversal (Chile) 187 – 8; demandsupply gaps 189; rights (debate) 179 – 80; rights, ownership (question) 180; salinization, seaplatforms (failure) 13 – 14; scarcity (Chile) 185 – 6; United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) definitions 190 Water Code (Chile), establishment 179, 189 – 90 Weber, Andreas 67 we, community (relationship) 99 – 106

Western Queens Community Land Trust (WQCLT) 100 – 1, 106 – 11; Queensboro Peoples Space (QPS) Building envisionment 108 – 9 whiteness, presence 58 Who Builds Your Architecture 120 Whyte, Kyle Powys 215, 227 wilderness, European civilizing/control 95 – 6 Williams, Miriam F. 40 Wilson, Mabel O. 39 Woodard, Roderick 233 – 4 word, assignation/inalienable right 34 work: reduction 120; refusal 119 – 20 worker’s cooperatives, holding 219 working-class people, struggle 97 work/labor structure 24 world language, alphabet representation 38 – 9 Woven Underground, Conflicting Ground 153 writing: act, material practice 34; reading, appearance 40 Yimer, Belachew 143 Young Lords, impact 103 Zapatistas: impact 127; pro-Zapatistas, enunciation 129 Zeleke, Elleni Centime 142