Redirecting the City?

Abstract

In framing the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism , Co-Curators Hyungmin Pai and Alejandro Zaera-Polo suggest “the cities of the world stand at a crossroads.” Calling for a new urban cosmology within which to think through the distribution of the “emerging commons ” they suggest are imperative to fairly organise and distribute to avoid inequality and environmental decay. This call comes from an acute awareness of the incapacity of current political and economic systems to address fundamental risks to the planet such as climate change and ever-increasing inequity among its inhabitants. Debate rages between the assertion that engaging in current political and economic frameworks can only result in the reproduction of the inequities upon which they are based, and the alternate view that perhaps these current structures might be re-appropriated to different ends.

The discipline of architecture can surely be called upon as a key instrument in this project, but for two conceptual barriers – a resolution on the matter of engagement with existing structures, and a rethinking of the discipline that might trigger new professional formations more suitable to this task than the profession of architecture as it is currently constituted. I will explore, by example, a specific apparatus that attempts to navigate the disciplinary and governmental impasse that sits before us. The context for thinking through the opportunities for and limitations of this apparatus is foregrounded by bodies of scholarship across two separate but interrelated themes: the replacement of politics by management (Ranciere, Zizek, Morton etc); and a consideration of the professional anxieties of the discipline of architecture as it pertains to this political condition (Harvey, Cunningham, Swyendouw, Lahiji, Deamer et al.).