Spatial Practices and the Urban Commons

About

The event series will take shape in variety of formats over the course of 8 weeks, including talks, discussions, seminars, workshops, tours and publication launches, and will include contributions by Can Altay, Thomas Dobson, Fernando García-Dory, Sabel Gavaldon, Adelita Husni-Bey, Matthew Fuller, Platon Issaias and Godofredo Pereira, Tim Ivison, Adam Kaasa, Josie McVitty, Emily Rosamond, Louise Shelley, Tijana Stevanović, Ben Vickers and Joanna Warsza.

The gallery will be open during regular hours. It will host an exhibition including a research library and a debate space on the ground floor, while a screening will be happening downstairs. Can Altay's ongoing journal, 'Ahali' will unfold into an installation, including some new contributions.  Adelita Husi-Bey's video ‘Ard’ (Land), 2014 will present a specific case study of ‘Cairo 2050’, a government-backed and privately funded metropolitan development plan of epic proportions, which threatens the livelihood of many informal settlements.

In the view of the recent unparalleled scale of urban expansion, issues of living together, the urban commons, and how to create discursive, agonistic, democratic spaces have become subjects with outstanding importance. In the past century we have seen an ever growing number of people move to the cities: more than half of the world’s population live there now, and continuously add to the sprawling margins of the urban settlements, while also creating new ways of living. UN Habitat estimates that by 2030 approximately 2 billion people will be living in ‘informal’, self-build communities, mostly without the basic infrastructure such as transportation, sanitation, running water etc. To confront the distinction between formal and informal, it is important to address both as forms that come as a result of specific power relations and forms of governance.

Architecture defines our modes of living together as a group, as a community, and in general as people in cities and of the globe. These varying degrees of togetherness (should) come with responsibilities. What kind of structures could enable us to have better life and communities? Can we invent spaces in support of a form of political imagination? We are particularly inspired by those structures and settings the commons create and take.