Race, Space & Architecture
Race, Space & Architecture
An Open Access Curriculum
This project asks what a curriculum on space-making and race-making might look like with architecture and the designed world as a key reference point. We engage with how understandings of race-making might be extended through imagined and constructed forms of architecture. Buildings, highways, suburbs and townships are constitutive of how individuals become positioned in a vast spectre of racial segregation, tangible in the shape of space and the materiality of concrete and corrugated iron. In this curriculum architecture is a way of imagining, building and validating a world. Architecture is bricks and mortar; the interior arrangements of culture in the positioning of thresholds, openings and objects; and the accumulation of these built forms and practices into social forms of association and dis-association. Architecture is also professionalised, existing as a highly mediated form of knowledge-making that interacts with speculators, planning authorities and local communities for its pay checks, compliance and legitimation. It lays claim to the physical and experimental possibilities of imagining that is frequently communicated through the visual formats of drawings, models, exhibitions and buildings.
At the project’s core is an understanding of racialisation as a process of violent displacement - of person, of land, of future - simultaneously with an emplacement through citizenship status, territory, built objects and knowledge forms. Our curriculum recognises a lineage of racialised hierarchies endemic to capitalist systems and cultural life that extend from colonialism to coloniality, slavery to incarceration, liberalism to subordination, and sovereignty to populism. We question both the subject of ‘race’ and the subject of architecture: how individuals are rendered as labourer, domestic worker, or immigrant in legal and cultural terms, with how the architectures of camp, compound and detention centre solidify the symbolic and lived forms of these positions. Yet within, around and beyond these structures of racial capital, is the substance of transgression. It conveys how struggles for social justice are galvanised through space in the convening powers of the margins, and in the arrangements of material and practices that together stake a place. Dance halls, streets, and spiritual interiors are counter architectures in which different circuits of connection, processes of validation and alternative ways of inhabiting the world are established.
We engage with three key questions
What are the spatial contours of capitalism that produce racial hierarchy
and injustice?
What are the inventive repertoires of refusal, resistance and re-making that are neither reduced to nor exhausted by racial capitalism, and how are they spatialised?
How is ‘race’ configured differently across space, and how can a more expansive understanding of entangled world space broaden our imagination for teaching
and learning?
A Methodological Orientation
If race-making is configured in processes of displacement and emplacement, then part of the work of this curriculum must extend to methods that stretch across the unspectacular spatial practices necessitated by living with very little, to the extreme spatialities of banishment and punishment. Which vocabularies are able to incorporate the vast extent of dehumanisation across the spaces of body, nation and globe, and the reconstitutions of a humanity that speaks to a shared planetary future? What counter-mappings might allow us to push for wider and more varied forms of knowledge and understanding?
We begin first, to think though the frames that allow us to identify specific process of power and racialisation and the spaces and built forms in and through which they are sustained and transgressed. Within each frame we collect a range of references in the forms of film, drawings and text, to place together the varied modes of knowing about race-making and space-making. Some of these sources and inspirations come from the discipline of architecture, many do not. This is an important part of unsettling the disciplinary conventions of what architecture is, how it can be taught, and how architecture’s on the ground impacts and future possibilities can be understood.
Collecting, Selecting and Sharing a Curriculum
This curriculum is arranged in six frames each capturing ongoing process of racial ordering that is spatial and material: centralising, circulating, domesticating, extracting, immobilising and incarcerating.
Each frame is populated with different forms and modes of expression. We are mindful of the rich contributions of film, fiction and visualisation to help us see differently, and a selection – by no means definitive – comes upfront as a reference to the richly creative ways in which ‘race’, space and architecture is present in poetry, stories, and moving images. This is followed by a grouping of projects and images that help to reveal the textures and formal dimensions of race-making as it unfolds in space and architecture. Some of the links to projects are about the rampant dispossession of people from spaces and buildings in which they form lives and livelihoods. The links lead you to insights about activism, and how protest emerges and is sustained in and through buildings and spaces. Other links will take you sites which illuminate different ways of imagining human connection and disconnection, providing a vocabulary of different ways of thinking, learning and acting.
None of our frames or lists are in any way definitive, complete or precise. They are collections and selections of material that are intentionally varied in geography, discipline and form, and they are intended to provide an engaging and varied entry point into ways of thinking ‘race’, space and architecture. In this way we hope to reconstitute the idea of an archive as a messy, incomplete collection and selection of materials, that is enriched by a variety of forms of knowledge as much as by a collage of reference points drawn across the planet. For references we have listed as core texts we have engaged directly with respective authors who have kindly agreed to share their texts. The first phase of this curriculum was published in June 2019.
Six Frames
While the six frames of the curriculum both overlap and omit, each frame points to a particular arrangement of political and economic power, everyday practices and spatial typologies. In each frame, we place different geographies side by side, connect processes ranging from harbouring to off-shoring, and explore relations between apparently dissimilar architectures. Ours is a vocabulary of hostels, homes, suburbs, ghettos, villages, gated communities, camps, prisons and the parks; a plethora of intimate and world orders in which ‘race’ and space coalesce.
The design of centrality – of city centres, public squares, museums, neighbourhood precincts and tourist zones – is invested in the question of value; what matters and by extension, who matters. Constitutions of ‘authenticity’ are rendered in the ethos and aesthetics of centralising and its modalities of ‘whiteness’, as well as spatial forms of ethno-nationalisms.
Moving or having to be on the move speaks to the immense efforts and ingenuities required to undertake a journey and the heightening of borders that hinder these flows. In circulating, ‘race’ is destabilised and remade in markets, music halls and spiritual spaces, leading to new spatial displacements and solidarities.
Domesticating occurs through the dispossession of and entitling to land. Through the control and disciplining of home and the gendering of labour, inequalities are secured in forms of suburbanising, compounding and ghettoising, and recomposed in the makeshift modes of squatting.
The stripping out of assets dislocates humanity, goods and responsibilities to an ‘elsewhere’, through the legal and material constitution of special zones such as mines, harbours and dumping sites. In this process, labour is also dislocated by being rendered less visible and without rights, increasingly apparent in new mutations of casualised economies.
The structure, technologies and rhetorical performance of the state is central to illegalising and limiting the mobility of racialised and classed subjects. The extreme violation of rights proliferates in partitions and borders but is also evident in the banality of waiting rooms and processing of offices.
Incarcerating is the surveillance and punishment of racialised, ethnicised and religious ‘others’. Spatial typologies extend from detention camps to data capture technologies, to stop and search on street sidewalks.