Various Authors - edited by Federico Venturini, Emet Degirmenci and Inés
Morales Bernardos - Ed. Zero in condotta pp.208 EUR 15.00 ----Architecture is always a political programme. The city is the concrete
form that social and power relations take in space. Joseph Gibbons,
quoted by Federico Venturini in his essay "Reconceptualising the Right
to the City and Spatial Justice Through Social Ecology", states that
"people who live in ghettos know perfectly well that they are different
from those who live in whiter and wealthier neighbourhoods. They know
that it is not a coincidence.[...]People understand that they live in a
socially produced space and are able[...]to give an explanation of how
this works." The ability to read these power relations should
necessarily lead to the desire to influence them, to change them, to
accommodate them to one's own existence. The city is the place where the
contradictions and excesses of capital are made explicit, but it is also
the place of accelerated exchange, a catalyst for cultures and
encounters. Can it also be a place of rebirth?
The various essays in this collection, despite profound differences in
approach and method, propose and describe forms of "revolutionary
citizenship", inspired by the currents of social ecology that have dealt
with urban planning: Murray Bookchin, Henri Lefebvre,
"activist-researchers" in the footsteps of Bakunin and Kropotkin, but
also the concrete experiences in Rojava and Greece.
A very broad overview of approaches to the question of the so-called
"right to the city", from points of view that range from the most
"reformist" to those most critical of institutions, such as that of the
Greek author Theodoros Karyotis, who, analyzing the urban struggles of
resistance against austerity policies, highlights the not always
harmonious dialectic between the two different "grammars" of popular
initiative and the "discourse of rights", criticizing the very concept
of "right to the city" as a liberal tradition, and further problematizes
the commons by framing the risk of capitalist subsumption and other
limits of the commons.
The great cultural antecedent of this collection is Murray Bookchin,
whose "legacy" is recounted by Brian Morris in his essay: it is
interesting to note that in the debate on nature and culture, Bookchin
rejects the human-parasite dyad in opposition to the Nietschian approach
typical of radical Malthusian extinctionist environmentalism. Bookchin's
thought also differs from that of Karl Marx, for whom nature is the
"kingdom of necessity", to be dominated in a productivist way to satisfy
the material needs of the human species. For Bookchin, on the other
hand, nature is a process, not passive matter, and the human is all
natural, even in its symbolic, associative and cultural life. Mutual
aid, subjectivity and self-determination are also fundamental in
evolution, and the solution to the human/nature dichotomy is very
constructive and prefigures countless paths of ecological action that
replace domination with complementarity. This approach would also seem
to reconcile with mystical approaches to environmentalism (see
Starhawk), maintaining intact a basis of rational, amoral dialectics,
which does not find ethical inspiration from first nature, but from a
conscious choice of positioning.
The city is the place of capitalist accumulation and the worst natural
environment in existence. It is the place of prohibitions and where
class and ethnic boundaries materialize in a more or less rigid way (red
zones, discriminatory zoning, gentrification). It is also the place
where the theater of decorum takes place, of the distancing from the
center of popular projects and activities, of the extreme
commodification of the landscape, of social control through "hostile
design", such as benches where you cannot sit,
The city is also projected on the project of future society resulting
from the balance of power in the field, clearly always as a commentary
on the present, from the post-war illusions of Metroland and garden
cities, of urbanization as the only possibility of social mobility, to
today's follies of the linear city in Saudi Arabia, etc.
Surely the mode of action that we see in today's cities passes through
the banning of the reuse and maintenance of the existing, everything
must be built from scratch obviously appropriating free spaces and
making them profitable, without ever consulting the residents. At a time
like this, the municipalist proposals contained in this book are more
useful than ever, clearly in the hope that spontaneous and
purpose-driven citizens' committees can in some cases become something
more permanent.
Those who label these struggles as "citizenist", perhaps because they
adopt an avant-garde point of view, ignore the great popular potential
that resides in urban struggles, and the concrete work of regeneration
on the ground that can be carried out. Let us remember that a large part
of Colin Ward's numerous publications have been dedicated precisely to
urban planning, to "garden cities", but also to very practical themes
such as water distribution systems, urban gardens, the position of
children in the city, etc... A work aimed at illustrating the practices
of transformation by accretion, self-managed and almost spontaneous and
"unconscious", without heavy central planning. If this isn't anarchy...
Intended for the militant public, this collection is a useful "toolbox"
that also allows for comparison across many disciplines of approaches
that are sometimes distant from each other, and gives concrete examples
of how pervasive struggles of this kind are, of success stories to
imitate, and of some traps to avoid.
Architecture, and urban planning, to the extent that it presents itself
as "that which puts an end to an inexorable process of worsening of the
conditions of the city and the territory under examination and as the
beginning of a virtuous process of their improvement." (Bernardo Secchi)
if fruitfully contaminated by anarchic notions can become an interesting
form of concrete planning of the possible.
Review by Julissa
https://umanitanova.org/ecologia-sociale-e-diritto-alla-citta-recensione/
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