Book review: The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume II: Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities

Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume II: Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities, New York: Routledge, 2024; 724 pp.: ISBN: 978-1-00311-247-1, £215.00 (hbk)

The intersection of urban space, architecture and politics has become a well-trodden domain across the social sciences. Indeed, recent decades have witnessed an exponential rise in studies preoccupied with questions relating to this thematic intersection. For editors Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi, the second volume of their Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics is an appeal to explore political ‘alternatives’ by thinking past the traditional boundaries of architectural and urban practice. Although it is certainly a timely appeal given the multiple urgent global crises we face today, it is not necessarily a novel one. However, the volume’s call to arms is revitalised by the 35 contributing chapters that offer an impressive range of topical case studies, geographic contexts and methodological approaches – from the ethnographic to the microbial. Particularly for introductory audiences, the second volume of this handbook will serve as an instructional resource to explore a wide range of contemporary urban and architectural issues around the globe.

Where this volume truly shines, and where I locate its greatest contribution, is the large number of chapters (I counted 12 out of 36) written by various architects, practitioners and pedagogues, which foregrounded how the authors enact alternative spatial practice through their own initiatives and/or participatory studies. Had the volume consisted primarily of such contributions, or dedicated a section to them – for instance, a section focused on alternative architectural institutional models, which united Jane Rendell et al.’s chapter ‘Practicing Ethics: Processes, Principles, Practices’ with Mark Olweny’s ‘Necessary Transgressions in Architectural Education in Uganda’, Loren Adams’‘A Triptych of Glitchy Linguistic Bots Co-write Building and Planning Regulations’ and Peggy Deamer’s ‘A Common: The Architecture Lobby’– this could have foregrounded how the ever-salient question of the (alternative) political potential of architecture was being reimagined and enacted through praxis.

Despite its many merits, the volume does have some weaknesses: namely, its organisational structure and curatorial focus. The volume is organised into seven parts, the first of which is an introduction penned by the two editors, followed by five thematic sections: ‘Events and Dissidence’, ‘Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire’, ‘Climate and Ecology’, ‘Urban Commons and Social Participation’ and ‘Marginalities and Postcolonialism’. The volume ends with a contributor’s chapter that functions (somewhat unsuccessfully) as a concluding section. The organisation of the main thematic sections at times detracted from the otherwise engaging chapters. As a reader, I was left questioning whether certain contributions best fit in the section they were assigned to and why there appear to be unexplained overlaps between sections. For instance, despite the fourth thematic section being dedicated to the ‘the commons’, there were two earlier contributions – Gerhard Bruyns and Stavros Kousoulas’‘Re-politicising the Urban: Commoning Technicities in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement’ and Peggy Dreamer’s ‘A Common: The Architecture Lobby’– that use ‘the commons’ as a central conceptual framework. The result is a repeated engagement with the literature on ‘commoning’, as well as lingering questions for the reader as to why these pieces were excluded from the fourth section. Similarly, Kim Trogal and Anna Wakeford Holder’s chapter on socialist feminist practices of participatory urban planning activities in Britain seems to fit better with the other chapters in the ‘Urban Commons and Social Participation’ section rather than the ‘Marginalities and Postcolonialism’ section in which it was placed. The repetitive reference to ‘the commons’ outside of the dedicated section is not a flaw in and of itself: had this query been anticipated by the editors, it could have been leveraged by way of explicit commentary as to which pieces were grouped together over others, hypothesising why it may be meaningful that this conceptual framework is found repeatedly throughout the volume, and what might this tell us about the fact that scholars are increasingly turning to ‘the commons’ as a way of making sense of the state of architecture and urban practice today? Unfortunately, this overlap went unaddressed.

Additionally, as a reader, I was distracted by the several ‘doppelganger’ chapters that tackle similar topics, typologies or themes: for instance, Iain Borden’s chapter on the alternative community of the Venice Skatepark in Los Angeles and Tom Critchley and Jakub Novotny’s chapter on community inclusivity in the 7Hills Skatepark in Amman, Jordan; Javier Arbona-Homar and Julie Sze’s chapter on the contentious redevelopment of the Vallejo, California waterfront and Nikolina Bobic’s chapter also focused on a controversial waterfront redevelopment, this time in Belgrade; or two cases of performative anti-government protest overwhelming public space in Bruyns and Kousoulas’ chapter on the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, and Stephen Loo’s ‘The Butcher of Nang Lerng’ in Bangkok. To repeat my previous critique, the mirroring of such ‘doppelganger’ chapters is not a fault in and of itself. In fact, it could have been an intriguing editorial decision to pair these similar pieces together in a single section, analyse where they converge or diverge, then compile a series of subsequent contributions that speak to the points of either similarity or departure. Alternatively, the presence of these mirrored chapters could have been explicitly foregrounded in the editors’ introduction to the volume to help the reader anticipate these evident parallels. While other contributors were tasked with writing introductory chapters for each of the core thematic sections – many of which were highly insightful and theoretically sophisticated – these were often insufficient to remedy the overarching questions relating to the organisation across, rather than simply within, individual sections.

The second weakness I locate in this volume relates to the curatorial oversight presented in the introduction of the volume. As a reader, I was missing an explicit discussion as to the exact aims of this volume in relation to the specific contributions selected, not just the discipline at large, and how the organisational structure of the volume facilitates these aims. Instead, the introduction functions more as an annotated bibliography, shifting swiftly between popular themes in architecture and urban studies. The collection of brief and diverse discussions often lacked adequate signposting and transitional reflections that would help orientate the reader. I was often left wondering which reflections were summaries of an author’s work, and which indicated the convictions of the editors and the goals of the volume. Accordingly, I felt inclined to continuously revisit the first paragraphs of the text to recall the analytical vector of the introduction, and therefore of the volume as a whole. Nevertheless, the breadth of topics covered in the introduction is not a flaw in and of itself. Rather, it is the lack of unifying thread, of coherent signposting of goals, arguments, questions and curatorial oversight, that turned what could have been a broad survey of themes into an occasionally scattered engagement with the relevant literature.

Because the breadth of topics featured in the introduction was so wide, the discussion of said topics took the form of a somewhat superficial sampling of the theoretical ‘heavy hitters’– quick allusions to the popular ideas of Lefebvre, Foucault, Harvey, Jacobs and the like. What was lacking, in turn, was an attempt to address how these core concepts are neither novel nor insular but have evolved into entire genealogies of thought, adapted by numerous scholars over many decades. One need not go far to locate the enduring influence of the work of Lefebvre, for instance, on contemporary urban and architectural scholarship; in this journal, we find numerous such articles within the last five years alone (Abello et al., 2023; Ben, 2020; Charalampos and Kaika, 2022; Degen and Rose, 2024; Purcell, 2022; Ziwen, 2022). One consequence of this wide-breadth approach to the introduction is that it a priori limits the scope of readership for the volume. However, for an audience beginning to familiarise themselves with the core concepts and thinkers in the realm of urban and architectural theory, this sort of cursory overview will be an invaluable primer to launch further research. Overall, the length and breadth of this volume is a feat, capturing a wide range of global experiences and thematic perspectives. For a more specialist reader, however, this volume is best engaged with in fragments rather than as a cohesive whole.

References

Abello CA, Lombard M, Guarneros-Meza V (2023) Framing urban threats: A socio-spatial analysis of urban securitisation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Urban Studies 60(14): 2741–2762. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Ben G (2020) Dreaming dialectically: The death and life of the Mexico City charter for the right to the city. Urban Studies 57(10): 2064–2079. Crossref;Web of Science; Google Scholar

Charalampos T, Kaika M (2022) The refugees’ right to the centre of the city: City branding versus city commoning in Athens. Urban Studies 59(6): 1130–1147. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Degen M, Rose G (2024) Conceptualising aesthetic power in the digitally mediated city. Urban Studies 61(11): 2176–2192. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Purcell M (2022) Theorising democratic space with and beyond Henri Lefebvre. Urban Studies 59(15): 3041–3059. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Ziwen S (2022) A rhythmanalysis approach to understanding the vending-walking forms and everyday use of urban street space in Yuncheng, China. Urban Studies 59(5): 995–1010. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

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