Chapter 1 Ecologies of resistance and alternative spatial practices

Abstract

Architecture and the urban are connected to challenges around violence, security, race and ideology, spectacle and data. The first volume of this handbook extensively explored these oppressive roles.This second volume illustrates that escaping the corporatized and bureaucratized orders of power, techno-managerial and consumer-oriented capitalist economic models is more urgent and necessary than ever before. Herein lies the political role of architecture and urban space, including the ways through which they can be transformed and alternative political realities constituted. The volume explores the methods and spatial practices required to activate the political dimension and the possibility for alternative practices to operate in the existing oppressive systems while not being swallowed by these structures. Fostering new political consciousness is explored in terms of the following themes: Events and Dissidence; Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire; Climate and Ecology; Urban Commons and Social Participation; Marginalities and Postcolonialism. Volume II embraces engagement across disciplines and offers a wide range of projects and critical analyses across the so-called Global North and South. This multidisciplinary collection of 36 chapters provides the reader with an extensive resource of case studies and ways of thinking for architecture and urban space to become more emancipatory. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.