Suchergebnisse

"In the three decades following World War II, the French government engaged in one of the twentieth century's greatest social and architectural experiments: transforming a mostly rural country into a modernized urban nation. Through the state-sanctioned construction of mass housing and development of towns on the outskirts of existing cities, a new world materialized where sixty years ago little more than cabbage and cottages existed. Known as the banlieue, the suburban landscapes that make up much of contemporary France are near-opposites of the historic cities they surround. Although these postwar environments of towers, slabs, and megastructures are often seen as a single utopian blueprint gone awry, Kenny Cupers demonstrates that their construction was instead driven by the intense aspirations and anxieties of a broad range of people. Narrating the complex interactions between architects, planners, policy makers, inhabitants, and social scientists, he shows how postwar dwelling was caught between the purview of the welfare state and the rise of mass consumerism. The Social Project unearths three decades of architectural and social experiments centered on the dwelling environment as it became an object of modernization, an everyday site of citizen participation, and a domain of social scientific expertise. Beyond state intervention, it was this new regime of knowledge production that made postwar modernism mainstream. The first comprehensive history of these wide-ranging urban projects, this book reveals how housing in postwar France shaped both contemporary urbanity and modern architecture"--

This article examines theories of human territoriality and their historical role in the demise of public housing in Western Europe and North America between the 1960s and the 1980s. The neglect and privatization of the public housing stock and the withdrawal of the state in direct provision in this period are often subsumed under the category of neoliberalism. This article unpacks this narrative by focusing on the intersection between architecture and social science. It argues that the neoliberalization of housing not only constitutes a transformation of housing economics, from public to private funding, or design, from highrise blocks in large estates to semidetached or detached individual dwellings; it also constitutes an epistemological turn, which revolves around the shift from "habitat" to "human territoriality."

This article explores the architectural and intellectual history of géographie volontaire, a series of experiments in inserting design volition into the study of territory. From the 1940s until the 1970s, an important group of geographers, engineers, state administrators, urban planners, and architects in France used the novel term géographie volontaire, or 'volitional geography,' to convey their ambitions for a comprehensive organization of space, from the modernization of housing and industry to the shaping of the national territory at large. It was therefore less a subdiscipline of geography than a particular logic for intervention, originating in wartime national planning and carried by the ambitions of postwar reconstruction and development. Focusing on the relationship between knowledge and design, the article reveals how géographie volontaire circulated in the institutions of government and the hallways of academia and how it shaped state-led architecture and planning projects. Corresponding to postwar revisions of international modernism, géographie volontaire extended the conventional scales of architecture and urbanism to the territorial. Yet more than just a change in scale, it implied both a particular political economy and a particular organization of knowledge. Shaped by the intersection of architectural and geographical knowledge, territory became a central logic for the state-led management of postwar capitalism.

International audience ; Focusing on youth camp development in Germany and the United States during the interwar period, this article argues not only that such camps played a crucial role in the ways in which national societies dealt with their youth, but also that their history forces us to rethink relations between place-making, nationhood, and modern governing. First, the article addresses the historiography of youth movements in relation to current debates about spatiality, nationalism, and governmentality. The main part of the article examines organized camps, in particular by the German , the (Hitler Youth), and the American Boy Scouts, focusing on their transition from relatively spontaneous activities of particular social movements, to objects of professional design, national-scale planning and intricate management in the interwar period. This development demonstrates how in the seemingly trivial activity of camping, nationalism is interwoven with the project of conducting youth through contact with nature. Despite divergent contexts and political ideologies, youth camp development in this period constituted a set of practices in which the natural environment was deployed to improve the nation's youth, and to eventually reproduce them as governable subjects.

Focusing on youth camp development in Germany and the United States during the interwar period, this article argues not only that such camps played a crucial role in the ways in which national societies dealt with their youth, but also that their history forces us to rethink relations between place-making, nationhood, and modern governing. First, the article addresses the historiography of youth movements in relation to current debates about spatiality, nationalism, and governmentality. The main part of the article examines organized camps, in particular by the German Bünde, the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), and the American Boy Scouts, focusing on their transition from relatively spontaneous activities of particular social movements, to objects of professional design, national-scale planning and intricate management in the interwar period. This development demonstrates how in the seemingly trivial activity of camping, nationalism is interwoven with the project of conducting youth through contact with nature. Despite divergent contexts and political ideologies, youth camp development in this period constituted a set of practices in which the natural environment was deployed to improve the nation's youth, and to eventually reproduce them as governable subjects.

This article investigates the concept of the public sphere as a specific way of reading the city. In the light of current ambiguities of the urban condition, it poses the question of whether the concept does still, in fact, generate a solid geography for understanding the urban landscape. It explores the history and concept of the liberal public sphere, uncovers its rigid regime of identity formation in space, and problematizes its performative dimension by illustrating how this tends to envisage space as a merely passive and abstract stage on which dramatization takes place. In search of alternative ways of reading the city, it subsequently explores the complexity in relations between space and identity. It reconceptualizes space as a palimpsest of historical layers and rethinks identity by recognizing the workings of the strange(r) in constructions of space and identity. Finally, the article suggests the development of a nomadic geography that would allow for a progressive politics to open up gaps and folds in the homogeneous space and discover new spaces that are neither friends nor enemies, neither inside nor outside.Cet article étudie le concept de sphère publique comme méthode de lecture spécifique de la ville. Étant donné les ambiguïtés actuelles de la situation urbaine, on peut se demander si ce concept génère encore, dans les faits, une géographie solide permettant de comprendre le paysage urbain. Explorer l'historique et le concept de sphère publique libérale révèle son système rigide de formation des identités dans l'espace, et interroge sa dimension performative en montrant comment l'espace est pensé en tant que simple scène passive et abstraite où a lieu une théâtralisation. Recherchant d'autres modes de lecture de la ville, l'article examine ensuite la complexité des relations entre espace et identité. Il reconceptualise l'espace en tant que palimpseste de couches historiques et repense l'identité en admettant les mécanismes de l'étrange(r) dans les constructions spatiales et identitaires. Pour finir, l'article propose l'élaboration d'une géographie nomade permettant à une politique progressiste de créer fossés et plissements dans un espace homogène et de découvrir de nouveaux espaces qui ne seraient ni amis ni ennemis, ni intérieurs ni extérieurs.

"Grundlage des Buches sind Fotografien von Berliner Orten aus den Jahren 2001 und 2016, auf deren Grundlage renommierte Urbanisten eine aktualisierte kritische Analyse durchführen. Mit ihren Untersuchungen des städtischen Wandels tragen sie zur aktuellen Debatte über den öffentlichen Raum bei. Berlin ist ein exemplarischer Ort, um Antworten auf städtebauliche Fragen zu geben und damit eine neue Agenda für den Städtebau zu entwickeln"--

"Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has not only been a dominant paradigm in politics, but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of architecture and urbanism in geographically variable yet interconnected processes of neoliberal transformation across scales-from China, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the US, Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. Analyzing how buildings and urban projects in different regions since the 1960s have served in the implementation of concrete policies such as privatization, fiscal reform, deregulation, state restructuring, and the expansion of free trade, contributors reveal neoliberalism as a process marked by historical contingency. Neoliberalism on the Ground fundamentally reframes accepted narratives of both neoliberalism and postmodernism by demonstrating how architecture has articulated changing relationships between state, society, and economy since the 1960s"--