Suchergebnisse

Cyprus, the third-biggest island of the Mediterranean, situated in close proximity to southern Turkey and Syria, is home to a little more than 1 million inhabitants. Its geography is fragmented into the fertile Mesaoria plains of Nicosia district, the Trodoos mountains in the south, the Pentadaktylos mountains in the north, and 650 kilometres of coastline. Its political history is a micro-version of the conflicted histories of the Middle East. After the end of the British rule in 1960, the young independent state was torn by conflicts; and since the Greek coup d'état in 1974, which was followed by the Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island, Cyprus is divided into a Turkish-speaking North and Greek-speaking South Side. The most important consequence of what is known as the 'Cyprus dispute' however, is not only the longest UN-mandate in the world, but also the de facto expropriation of a third of the island's population in 1974, meaning 162,000 Greek Cypriots and 48,000 Turkish Cypriots. The unresolved postcolonial conflict is a conflict about property, as about a third of the land seems to have two legal owners, one from a bygone past and one from the present. The conflicted imaginaries of North and South, Muslim and Christian prevail not least because the wealth of the island is grounded in the real estate sector and its mobilization as capital under the guise of 'development'. First, the development as a global tourist destination in the 1960s, then the development as a global tax paradise in the 1990s, and finally as a shopping destination for EU citizens since 2014. We had planned our stay in Cyprus in the spring of 2018 years in advance. Once I had finished my PhD,I would take the invitation as a guest professor from the department of architecture, while Kaye would take a three-month sabbatical from his work as an editor of the German architectural magazine Bauwelt. The theme we sought to investigate was the recent processes of financialised urbanism in Cyprus's coastal cities. After the banking crisis in 2013, the government of the Republic of Cyprus launched a combined sale of EU citizenship in tandem with luxury real estate to boost the economy. An investment of 2 million euros in a luxury apartment by the sea ensures a European passport along with discrete opportunities of tax evasion, the imaginary of sunshine, a sea view, and relative political stability. If an architectural design studio and the processes of financialization constituted the official framework and leitmotif of our stay, the oral histories of colleagues and friends, everyday routines and touristic visits drew a different picture. They uncovered the relations within which climate change, the commodification of the coastline, global real estate transactions and Cyprus's violent postcolonial conflict are inseparably imbricated into one another. Instead of investigating the sale of EU passports, I attempted to approach those relations between territories, environments and imaginaries through the chance collection of a diary. Following up on Guattari's ecosophy between processes of subjectivation, the relation to others and the environment, I left the clear-cut history of the political economy of territorial development behind and followed the detours.

This thesis analyses the changes in architectural discourse, housing policies, and urban development before and after the neoliberal turn in France in the 1970s. Its topic is the relationship between housing and centrality in the urban periphery, and the key question is how this relationship changed in the course of the structural reforms of the 1970s following the economic crisis in France. The objects of this dissertation are six urban development projects designed by the Catalan architecture firm Ricardo Bofill–Taller de Arquitectura for the Parisian new towns and in the urban peripheries of Francoist Spain. The colossal housing project "The Spaces of Abraxas" in the Parisian new town Marne-la-Vallée, completed in 1983 during the heydays of postmodernism, serves as the starting point of the analysis. Subsequently, this study investigates Abraxas' unrealized predecessors from the late 1960s and early 1970s, multifunctional housing monuments conceived to transpose the qualities of historic city centers into the peripheries of Madrid, Barcelona and Paris. I trace the relational change of housing and centrality from two angles: first, I draw on my ethnographic research based on living on site in Abraxas; second, I contextualize Abraxas within the economic, esthetic and urban aspects of its planning history and its unrealized forerunners. By adopting this transdisciplinary approach, this work closes three gaps in architectural historiography. First, it provides a new reading of postmodernism through the analysis of the largely unknown transdisciplinary approach of Ricardo Bofill-Taller de Arquitectura, an approach which is closer related to Alexandre Kojève's interpretation of Hegel than to postmodernist language games. Second, the work foregrounds the French projects of Taller de Arquitectura which have neither been historically reviewed, nor embedded in the urban political context of the new town planning in Paris. Their analysis and contextualization opens up a new perspective on the claim of "urban innovation" in the implementation of the Parisian new towns before and during the cultural, economic and political upheavals of the 1970s. Third, my analysis of the neoliberal structural reforms of the 1970s and their effects on architecture, housing and urban space, through the case study of their socio-spatial consequences on Abraxas, shows ways to think of the architecture of housing as a process: as a process that emerges through political negotiation and continues to evolve in this way. ; Diese Dissertation analysiert die Veränderung von Architekturdiskurs, Wohnungsbaupolitik und Stadtentwicklung vor und nach der neoliberalen Wende in Frankreich in den 1970er Jahren. Ihr Thema ist die Relation von Wohnungsbau und Zentralität in der urbanen Peripherie und ihre Leitfrage lautet, wie sich diese Relation im Laufe der neoliberalen Strukturreformen nach der Wirtschaftskrise in Frankreich im Laufe der 1970er Jahre verändert hat. Gegenstand der Dissertation sind sechs städtebauliche Projekte des katalanischen Architekturbüros Ricardo Bofill–Taller de Arquitectura in den Pariser Neustädten und den Vororten von Barcelona und Madrid unter Franco. Ausgangspunkt ist der kolossale Wohnungsbau "Die Räume des Abraxas" in der Pariser Neustadt Marne-la-Vallée, der 1983 in der Hochphase der Postmoderne fertig gestellt wurde. Daraufhin untersucht diese Arbeit die unrealisierten Vorgänger von Abraxas aus den späten 1960er und frühen 1970er Jahren, die als multifunktionale Wohnungsbaumonumente die Zentrumsqualitäten historischer Innenstädte in die urbanen Peripherien von Madrid, Barcelona und Paris transponieren sollten. Die Fragestellung zur Entwicklung der Relation von Wohnungsbau und Zentralität entwickelte ich aus zwei Perspektiven: erstens, aus einer ethnographischen Recherche vor Ort in Abraxas, und, zweitens, aus der architektur-, stadt- und wirtschaftshistorischen Kontextualisierung seiner Planungsgeschichte und seiner Vorprojekte. Durch dieses transdisziplinäre Vorgehen schließt diese Arbeit eine dreifache Lücke der Architekturgeschichtsschreibung. Erstens eröffnet meine Analyse der surrealistischen Architekturkonzepte und der transdisziplinären Arbeitsweise von Ricardo Bofill–Taller de Arquitectura eine neue Lesart der Postmoderne, die eher mit der Hegel-Interpretation Alexandre Kojèves als mit postmodernen Sprachspielen in Verbindung zu bringen ist. Zweitens wurden die in dieser Arbeit untersuchten französischen Projekte von Taller de Arquitectura bisher weder im umfassenden Sinne historisch aufgearbeitet noch in den stadtpolitischen Kontext der Pariser Neustadtplanungen eingebettet. Ihre Analyse eröffnet eine neue Sicht auf den Anspruch einer städtebaulichen "Innovation" in der Umsetzung der Pariser Neustäde vor und während der kulturellen, ökonomischen und politischen Umbrüche der 1970er Jahre. Der dritte Punkt betrifft die neoliberalen Strukturreformen der 1970er und ihre Auswirkungen auf Architektur, Wohnungsbau und Stadtraum. Durch die Analyse dieser Reformen und das Aufdecken ihrer sozialräumlichen Konsequenzen auf Abraxas zeigt diese Arbeit Wege auf, um die Architektur des Wohnens als Prozess zu denken: als einen Prozess, der durch politische Verhandlungsräume entsteht und sich darin fortwährend weiterentwickelt.