This paper explores the capacities of design to interrogate the socio-spatial context in order to foreground conflict, dissent and dispute as creative practices to fuel urban transformation. In today’s urban habitat, spaces and actions do not mesh seamlessly. The city is characterised by a disjunction between the physicality of the urban fabric as a materialisation of ideologies and the relationality of contested supremacies and entropic dynamics that inhabit it. Consequently, the practices of contemporary transformative city-making need to be reinvented through temporality and impermanence, accounting for disorder and embracing instability. In that sense, antagonism is a key element to harness in critical design practices aimed at promoting urban diversity. In this paper we study how incorporating antagonism in design practices can trigger processes of urban reformulation by constituting liminal spaces of opportunity where democratisation emerges as a spatiotemporal practice. Two related case studies carried out in 2020 in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona (Subjective Cartographies: A Mirror of Diversity and Infrastructures for Public Space Interaction), are presented to explore how design can support dissidence and plurality, whether through identification and visualisation or by catalysing them as situated practices of active citizenship. In both case studies, design fosters de-hierarchisation and trans-linearity in the city, reclaiming the right to direct action in collective urban spaces. In this sense, this paper explores how design contributes to activating multiple processes of emancipated citizenship, harnessing conflict and constructive dissent as situated spatiotemporal practices to promote diversity. Facilitating the proliferation of counter-hegemonic notions of cosmopolitics, territory, domesticity and publicness, the design practices revisited in this paper operate between politics, space and affect in order to promote intersubjective relations in public spaces, using the material, temporal and affective dimensions of design to co-create diverse and resilient urban habitats.
This article investigates some of the implications of intimate design practices by presenting two academic projects carried out within the context of an uncertain present. It argues that design practices have the capacity to foster intimacy and affect through the lens of the politics of care. Drawing on the notion of affective bodies, the authors claim that design can explore new paths to reinvent the everyday, focusing on recent crisis-ridden contexts. The article examines how intimate practices that reformulate everyday politics can reclaim temporality, active citizenship and radical affectivity as infrastructural needs in contemporary urban habitats. The two case studies date from March 2020 through December 2021 under the climate of crisis brought about by the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Europe and the ongoing Mediterranean refugee crisis. Given the escalation of the blurring between the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, it is especially relevant to explore intimacy as a means of enacting politically empowered action through design. Both case studies aim to temporarily interrupt conventional uses of collective urban spaces in order to generate pockets of resistance that explore the subliminal potentials of urban spaces and allow us to imagine, and even experience, different ways of living through an updated lens of care. These irruptions of intersubjective appropriations of urban spaces not only have an emblematic impact, but also a cumulative effect by generating a growing network of affective bodies in action. This emergent affective network offers relevant opportunities for the transformation of crisis-ridden urban contexts through dynamic interactions between sociality and spatiality.
Portable Public Space: Embodied Responses to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis is ELISAVA’s proposal integrated within Navire Avenir, an international project to design and build a rescue ship for the Mediterranean, promoted by Sébastien Thiéry (Pôle d’Exploration des Ressources Urbaines, PEROU). One of the main objectives of this action-based research project is to propose new approaches to the European refugee crisis through intimate design practices of care. The project explores how to suspend European policies of distanced empathy by positing the human body as a direct practice instead of a passive subject. We wanted to avoid an all-too common superficial, distanced empathy with refugees by putting our own bodies on the line. We thus proposed an honest acceptance of our privileged position, which, while making it impossible for us to put ourselves in the shoes of migrants, allows us to experiment with our own bodies to explore new forms of the politics of care through design, implemented in immediate contexts of everyday life. In this sense, the project entails a series of affective transactions with the socio-political crisis activated by a first-person perspective and dynamic experimentation with the body. Affectivity and vulnerability articulate a design approach that explores the notion of a portable public space. The concept appears as we ask how to negotiate the harsh conditions on board a rescue ship, a space-time in which people live together without a shared cultural, social or spatial code. If urban public space acts as a potential catalyst for encounters with otherness, what kind of public space can we imagine for the heterotopic conditions of a rescue ship? Because we cannot intervene directly on the space of the ship or with the bodies of refugees at this stage, we engage our own bodies in our urban context to address this question. Consequently, portable public space becomes an operative concept to refer to body-centered practices aimed at generating a nomadic space-time, devoid of a stable spatial framework, that will ensure a sense of intimate protection, trigger a sense of belonging and encourage collective sharing. The project is developed in three phases. In the first phase, we explore the humanitarian emergency through field research of the refugee’s post-rescue journey and performative mapping actions to visualize the Mediterranean refugee crisis, identifying wearables and actions, respectively, as two crucial design formats. In the second phase, dynamic experimentation with the body is used to proliferate fast, visceral reactions to basic notions of protection, affect and mourning. In the final phase, we revisit wearables and actions as two possible formats of care-based design that explore the notion of a portable public space. Fundamentally, Portable Public Space: Embodied Responses to the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis explores new formats of public space related to the body-in-transit, in order to propose radical design approaches to the humanitarian crisis which posit the human body as the locus and the means for a revised practice of care.
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