Politics of dissensus in geographies of architecture: Testing equality at Ed Roberts Campus, Berkeley

Abstract

This paper evokes the writings of Jacques Rancière to propose a concept of politics for geographies of architecture that is attentive to the polemical conditions under which more equal ways of composing built environments emerge. Discussing Ed Roberts Campus, a building designed and operated by the disability community in Berkeley, California, it argues for a politics of architecture that does not entail conflicts over power or identity, but revolves around a testing of materials that alters the bodily circumstances built form offers for collective inhabitation. Such testing sets in motion an uncertain process where a building undergoes constant destabilisation by new claimants who verify and expand its equality. The paper then counterpoises this disruptive politics to institutional practices in order to investigate how its fragile after‐effects might be sustained.

New directions in the theorisation of temporary urbanisms: Adaptability, activation and trajectory

“…Firstly, 'critical' geographies of architecture illuminate not only the rhythms through which temporary built forms come to be but the ways in which built spaces come to be valued, contested and felt (den Besten et al, 2011;Kullman, 2019) by the 'agents of change'. Such scholarship therefore offers a further set of nuanced strategies and languages for mapping and questioning (from a new vantage point) several of the issues raised above: the precise choreographies of everyday life, through ethnographic observations, vignettes and visual methods (Kraftl, 2010;Lees, 2001); the ways in which particular spaces come to be viewed as 'vacant' given their histories; and the ways in which future trajectories -and their representation or materialisation as sketches, models or experiments -can be 'read' in terms of the ideals they embody (e.g.…”

Walking with light and the discontinuous experience of urban change

“…The senses are also imbricated in how illumination expresses the spatial inequality, stylistic claims of distinction, surveillant technologies, and standardisation discussed above. Yet this is not to infer that dominant regimes of sensibility invariably prevail, for possibilities for revealing the power behind sensory arrangements and offering alternative modes of organisation and new bodily capacities through what Rancière calls "dissensus" may emerge (Kullman, 2019).…”

“…As we move through the nocturnal city, our perceptive registers constantly adjust to shifting, contrasting, and overlapping lighting regimes and the insurgent contingencies of temporary and transient illuminations. The analytical attention we pay to these transitory moments is inspired by Rancière's (2009) aforementioned notion of dissensus: the gap that appears in the existing power relations that orient us towards moments “when politics appears and disappears again” (Kullman, 2019, p. 285). The night walk, we argue, holds the promise of attuning our senses to disturbances in the consensual distribution of the sensible, for walking is an embodied engagement through which attention is drawn to distinctive affordances – “the textures, forms and materials that combine and make up the urban landscapes in which we participate” (Hunter, 2017, p. 30).…”

“…Often, our cultural differences (one Danish, the other British) emerged through discussions of our immediate aesthetic judgements towards the transitions between bounded lighting schemes, providing an opportunity to situate our discussions about site‐specific lighting in relation to wider socio‐cultural concerns and our own prior extensive studies that have attuned us to attend to lighting. By paying attention to the edges of these schemes, we tried to discern how regimes of sensibility were established through dominant lighting schemes within bounded sites and where they blended or clashed with other forms of lighting we sought out gaps or “disruptions to dominant orders” (Kullman, 2019, p. 287).…”

“…The bridge also offers an encounter with the non‐human elements of this landscape, agencies that are unamenable to regeneration and gentrification and resist its orderly shaping (see Miéville, 2012), highlighting its artifice (Kullman, 2019). Looking down we see the flowing, rippling River Lea, nearing its entry into the Thames estuary from the Chiltern Hills, silver in reflecting the surrounding lights.…”