Suchergebnisse

The paper focuses on Cornelius Castoriadis and Henri Lefebvre's approaches and sheds light on "the imaginary" in the politics of self-governance. It shows how tactics of self-governance and the imagi-nary accompanying them revive all the contradictions between the State reason, on the one hand, and human reason and freedom, on the other hand. Castoriadis, in The Imaginary Institution of Soci-ety, emphasizes the internal relation between what is intended (the development of autonomy) and that through which it is intended (the exercise of this autonomy). He notes that these are two mo-ments of a single process and defines as revolutionary politics "a praxis which takes as its object the organization and orientation of society as they foster the autonomy of all its members and which rec-ognizes that this presupposes a radical transformation of society, which will be possible, in its turn, only through the autonomous activity of individuals." My paper treats the following questions: How might a politics like this exist? On what could it be based and what would its implications be for the tactics of formation of urban design tools? Henri Lefebvre, in "Theoretical Problems of Autogestion", underscores the fact that autogestion intro-duces and stimulates a contradiction with the State. Autogestion, according to Lefebvre, calls into question the State's functioning as a constraining force erected above society as a whole, capturing and demanding the rationality that is inherent to social relations and practice. Lefebvre also considers that autogestion tends to resolve contradictions by subletting them into a new totality. In parallel, he wonders whether the principle of autogestion is an ideal whose rational core and content is ultimately derived from the democratic ideal. My paper will revisit this question, juxtaposing it to the following question raised by Castoriadis, in The Imaginary Institution of Society: does the critique of rationalism not exclude the possibility of establishing a destructive and constructive 'revolutionary dynamics'? Despite Lefebvre's claim that autogestion cannot be a utopia, he refers to Henri Desroche's notion of "occupia", which is used to define a genre of socializing related to practical utopia. He claims that au-togestion "shows the practical way to change life". My aim is to present how this "practical way to change life" in Lefebvre's thought relates to Castoriadis' understanding of praxis. Juxtaposing Cas-toriadis' conception of autonomy and Lefebvre's understanding of autogestion, I examine what strat-egies of bottom-up urban politics are implied by each of these conceptions. Taking as a starting point the fact that Castoriadis' praxis is based on a kind of knowledge that is always fragmentary and provi-sional, I examine what would be entailed by an integration of such a conception of knowledge into the procedures of formation of urban design tools. Special attention is paid to how Lefebvre and Cas-toriadis' conceptions and autogestion respectively aimed to reinvent the relationship between public space and the collective ideal.

Festac '77, also known as the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture was a major international festival held in Lagos, Nigeria, from 15 January 1977 to 12 February 1977. This paper focuses on Doxiadis Associates' masterplan for Festac Town, a federal housing estate located along the Lagos-Badagry Expressway in Lagos State, Nigeria, paying special attention to the infrastructure along the Lagos-Badagry Highway (fig. 1). This project, which exemplifies the late modernist concerns for urban development in the Global South and should be understood within the context of modernisation that followed Nigeria's independence, concerned the design of a town aiming at hosting the visitors of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos in 1977 (fig. 2). It was assigned in 1974 by the Federal Republic of Nigeria to Doxiadis Associates and was conceptualized as "a model residential community with all the necessary functions and facilities to serve a permanent population" after the end of the aforementioned festival. This masterplan was based on the theory of ekistics developed by Greek city planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, and included the construction of significant infrastructure installations. The scope of the paper is twofold: to investigate the connections between Doxiadis's understanding of the role of infrastructure in this project and his conception of 'Ecumenopolis', and to relate Doxiadis's vision for 'Ecumenopolis' to the idea of Eurafrica, referring to the political project that emerged in the 1920s based on the idea that Europe's future survival was bound up with Europe's successful merger with Africa. Doxiadis's concept of 'Ecumenopolis' departed from the hypothesis that the urbanization, the growth of population, and the development of means of transport and human networks would lead to a fusion of the urban areas and megalopolises forming a single continuous planetwide city (fig. 3). Doxiadis's "Towards Ecumenopolis" (1961), a confidential report that focused on how to devise a "different approach" to the City of the Future, treated infrastructure as a skeleton of a body covering the entire globe and resulting from the balance between settlements, production and nature. In his second report on 'Ecumenopolis', Doxiadis claimed that Africa was the largest and most suitable area to welcome inbound capitals and investments. The Africa Transport Plan was intended to provide the basic layout of his 'Ecumenopolis'. The paper examines a set of maps displaying settlements, routes, airways and human corridors that Doxiadis Associates produced to explore the potentials of the concept of 'Ecumenopolis', relating the latter to Eurafrica. One can read in the issue of May 1977 of Ebony: "For 29 days, black people from everywhere - from Africa, Europe, African-America, South America, Canada, and the islands of the seas - testified to the haunting presence of blackness in the world". My objective is to examine closely the cultural-historic complexity of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, the so-called FESTAC '77, during which thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the Black diaspora assembled in Lagos. As Denis Ekpo remarks, in "Culture and Modernity Since FESTAC 77", in 1977, thanks to FESTAC, "Lagos had become the Mecca of African collective cultural and artistic self-retrieval and self-accreditation". The methodological approach on which the paper is based draws upon theoretical tools aims to go beyond "progress" or "influence", while the historiographical method on which the paper intends to challenge the schism between globalisation and regionalism.

Readers of this volume should be prepared to confront sets of provocative argument, polemic and advocacy discussed extensively in the form of three separate yet interrelated essays by scholars of design philosophy, history and education: Clive Dilnot, Tony Fry and Susan Stewart. Published as the first book in Bloomsbury's series Design, Histories, Futures, the volume appears as a framework for the other titles to come. It is challenging and dense, but ultimately a forceful and inspiringly articulated set of essays arguing that design as a discipline, practice and discourse has neglected what history means in general and exploring how history is made and remade by design in particular. While differing in the politics of their entry into the discussion of history and design, all three authors share the same ontological ground: that design and designing are embedded in history, and direct possibilities of making history within the past, present and future.