Cruz, Teddy, author.
Spatializing justice : building blocks / Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.
Berlin : Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH ; Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2022]
©2022
144 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), charts, map ; 24 cm
"In an era of declining public commitment, 'Spatializing Justice' reconnects design experimentation with social responsibility. With thirty short, manifesto-like texts - building blocks for a new kind of architecture - 'Spatializing Justice' offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven growth in cities today. Cruz and Forman advocate for expanded modes of practice through which architects and urbanists can design counter-spatial strategies, new political and economic processes, and new modalities of activism and sociability. 'Spatializing Justice' is dedicated to the memory of Michael Sorkin. This book is the first in a two volume series : 'Spatializing Justice : Building Blocks' ; 'Socializing Architecture : Top-Down / Bottom-Up'."--taken from back cover.
"Our research-based practice, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, is an unconventional partnership between a political theorist and an architect. Merging research, practice and pedagogy, our office is based inside a public research university, the University of California, San Diego. Against the dystopic backdrop of the border region - and risking professional suicide as architects - we came to understand that spatializing justice demands not only a focus on buildings, but a fundamental reorganization of social and economic relations. We concluded at some point that exposing the drivers of inequality and challenging exclusionary urban policies that undermine spatial justice is a generative ground for a more experimental architecture. We believe that a new political economy of urbanization, and a new design intelligence, can emerge from within peripheral zones of regional contestation like ours (and that transformational creativity is less likely to arise from within sites of stability and economic power). We believe that a new generation of architects and urban designers can anticipate new ways of thinking and doing, demand a new collective imagination with spatial implications, and steward a reorganization of public priorities and investment. 'Spatializing Justice : Building Blocks' outlines the commitments of our embedded research-based practice at the US-Mexico border. The Building Blocks position justice as a spatial concept, conceived dialectically as bottom-up urban power that recognizes, resists and counters the harms, degradations and exploitations of exclusionary top-down power - discriminatory urban regulation, the rule of law, and the entrenched conventions, social norms and biases that sustain these institutions. In other words, we articulate justice as a collective power from below to reclaim the city as a democratic and inclusive field. We believe that design can mediate conflicts between law and urban justice, between the top-down and the bottom-up, to spatialize collective rights to the city. Each Building Block occupies two spreads across four pages and contains three elements : a 'Provocation', a 'Referent', and the 'Building Block' itself. The first page begins with a 'Provocation' that describes an urban problematic that demands coordinated action from below. It is intended to provoke imaginative strategies to transcend it. The second page continues with a 'Referent', a brief description of an empirical case study, a story or an anecdote, a historical or contemporary example. Sometimes the Referent is a systemic failure, sometimes an untapped opportunity, sometimes a brilliant example of success, sometimes an unrequited urban fantasy. Spread across the third and fourth pages is the 'Building Block' itself, which performs as an operational diagram for action. Sometimes the Building Block elaborates a process from within our design practice ; sometimes it contains a speculative pathway, or translates an anecdote of bottom-up praxis through which we extrapolate a set of procedures. The Building Block is always visualized through a table or a process-based diagram that prioritizes concepts and prompts new ways of thinking and doing. It demonstrates our belief that diagrams are not merely descriptive devices for visualizing data, but projective tools that perform the information they contain and anticipate a course of action. In this sense, the Building Blocks are strategies for social, institutional and spatial transformation."--adapted from Building Blocks : An Introduction, pages 13 and 15-16.
9780262544535 (paperback)
0262544539 (paperback)
(electronic book)
9780262372046
377575220X (paperback)
9783775752206 (paperback)
(ebook)
9783775752794
Urban renewal.
City planning Moral and ethical aspects.
Architecture and society.
Rénovation urbaine.
Architecture et société.
urban renewal.
POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory.
Forman, Fonna, author.
Building blocks
Location: Library main 318451
Call No.: 318451
Copy: 1
Status: Available
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