Harnessing Conflict: Antagonism and Spatiotemporal Design Practices

Abstract

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.

Affective Bodies: Intimate Design Practices to Reinvent the Everyday

“…This brief study of some of the phenomena related to the socio-spatial networks of affect in the two abovementioned crisis contexts reveals a tendency of activating human agency as an immediate source of resilience, radical democracy and a re-imagining of the urban commons. A relational notion of care, overcoming normative moralistic attitudes (Bellacasa 2012, 198-199) and harnessing conflict as a fertile ground for new design practices (Paez and Valtchanova 2021) ushers in new possibilities for this human agency. Affective and intimate experiences of exceptionality present opportunities for enhancing the operativity of first-person-perspective design practices to reinvent the everyday.…”

JIDA : textos de arquitectura docencia e innovación 9

“…Art-based collaborative educational formats trigger an emancipatory pedagogical environment based on strategies of indeterminacy and learning through direct action, which disable traditional hierarchic forms of authorship. Intuition, inventiveness, interrogative disposition (Danvers, 2003) and a projective take on antagonism (Paez and Valtchanova, 2021a) become main principles in these educational approaches and constitute a performative context for supple authorship.…”

Integration of Art-Based Research in Design Curricula

“…From this perspective, art-based collaborative educational formats trigger an emancipatory pedagogical environment based on strategies of indeterminacy and learning through direct action, which disable traditional hierarchic forms of authorship. Intuition, inventiveness, interrogative disposition (Danvers 2003) and a projective take on antagonism (Paez and Valtchanova 2021) become main principles in these educational approaches and constitute a performative context for supple authorship.…”