As architects we can no longer deny the politics of our work, each of our decisions affects society and the planet. As such we must develop a critical understanding of the built environment and our role as architects within it.

The aim of the History and Theory course is two-fold, first to engage you with a base understanding of theoretical concepts in relation to the built environment - giving you a core understanding to respond to. Secondly it is about adequately preparing yourself for how to research, present and draw conclusions from theory into proposition, one of our core aims is to bridge this gap between theory and practice.

Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition 1964

Vita Activa (active life)
vs.
Vita Contemplativa (contemplative life).

Activa - labor, work and action.

History and Theory - City Making

Praxis

City Making

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Attica_06-13_Athens_50_View_from_Philopappos_-_Acropolis_Hill.jpg

https://nextcity.org/features/view/sao-paulo-housing-crisis-master-plan-zeis-haddad-habitat-iii

Architects and the city

Polis: a Greek city-state; broadly : a state or society especially when characterized by a sense of community

Merriam Webster Dictonary

"The reproduction of capital passes through processes of urbanization in myriad ways. But the urbanization of capital presupposes the capacity of capitalist class powers to dominate the urban process. This implies capitalist class domination not only over state apparatuses, but also over whole populations-their lifestyles as well as their labor power, their cultural and political values as well as their mental conceptions of the world.

That level of control does not come easily, if at all. The city and the urban process that produces it are therefore major sites of political, social, and class struggles. We have heretofore examined the dynamics of this struggle from the standpoint of capital. It therefore remains to examine the urban process-its disciplinary apparatuses and restraints as well as its emancipatory and anti-capitalist possibilities-from the standpoint of all those who attempt to gain their livelihood and reproduce their daily lives in the midst of this urban process.


David Harvey - Page 66, The Urban Roots of the Capitalist Crisis

"Mutual knowledge is not determined by professional norms and expectations, but rather is founded in exchange, in negotiation, out of hunch, out of intuition. Mutual knowledge means abandoning the hierarchies embedded in most professional relationships ("I know more than you do,”) and instead welcoming contributions from everyone in the spirit of a shared enterprise.”

Schneider and Till, Spatial Agency - Page 32

98%
of world's
buildings are
not designed by
Architects

"Today, 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. Projections show that urbanization combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050, with close to 90 percent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa, according to a new United Nations report launched today."

http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html

What is the role of theory

“It is for Lefebvre a revolutionary declaration: as urban inhabitants we reject the property rights and exchange value of the industrial city, and we affirm our own power and ability to manage the production of urban space for ourselves.”

Purcell - The right to the city: the struggle for democracy in the urban public realm - Page 322

"Traditional architectural practice may be associated with predetermined action, or of anticipating the world dogmatically, through its habit of playing out established themes. Against this a critical practice or rather, to use the accepted word, "praxis", starts with an open-ended evaluation of the particular external conditions, out of which action arises with no predetermined outcome but with the intention to be transformative.

Praxis, in the sense of action propelled by a critical understanding of external conditions, moves away from the normative concerns and structures of traditional practice, and also away from the endless deferral and retreat of "critical” theory and practice."

Schneider and Till - Spatial Agency, Page 29

“The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be”

Hannah Arendht - Human Condition, Page 198

The city ”is our most consistent and on the whole, our most successful attempt to remake the world we live in more after our heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which we created, it is the world in which we are henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city we have remade ourselves."

Robert Parks in David Harvey, The Right to the City