In Common - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, David Brown, Fabrizio Gallanti, Nikolaus Hirsch

Contributors Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Jesko Fezer, Dele Adeyemo, Anna Nnenna Abengowe, Meriem Chabani, Elisa Iturbe, Stanley Cho, Huda Tayob, Mawena Yehouessi, Ethel Baraona Pohl

For as long as cities have been sites for exploitation and the capitalist generation of wealth, they have also been sites of emancipatory struggle. This is because, most simply, what is experienced in cities is also experienced by others. By bringing people together into shared environments, they provide fertile ground for reflecting on the conditions of collective existence and imagining more equitable and just forms of life.

In Common is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, and arc en rêve within the context of its exhibition “common, community driven architecture.”

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10 essays

A support structure made of timber, care, and affect

Ethel Baraona Pohl

In response to the worldwide economic recession of 2008, the housing cooperative La Borda was born from the desire of a community of people to create a dignified living environment.

Collective Common Crew

Mawena Yehouessi

Beware of the Triple C, like a tendency to conflate, capture, and capitalize. Communities as collectivity aren’t necessarily the same as communit…

Precarious Homes

Huda Tayob

Making home is a practice of creating a common space with the presence of many other pasts. Home is always both present and distant; a difficult and contested terrain which must be worked at and maintained.

Transgressing Immutable Lines

Elisa Iturbe and Stanley Cho

What is required to address these issues is nothing less than a general reorientation and reorganization of social space, away from extractive economies and industrial production, and towards maintenance, stewardship, repair, and care.

Hidden Mosques, Quiet Atrophy

Meriem Chabani

Beyond implementation, however, mosque architecture in France remains largely influenced by the places of origin of its immigrant Muslim populations, which consolidates the image of Islam as foreign to France, rather than a legitimate part of the national religious landscape. Public architecture of French mosques fails to reflect the diversity—and thus meet the needs—of the French Muslim community.

The Flaneuse and the Fugitive Brief

Anna Nnenna Abengowe

With this encounter we had two aspirations: Firstly, to meet the city in a confrontation with reality that refuses the purely aesthetic (the former often being stronger than the latter) and removes the idea of the city. Secondly, we wanted to confront the specter of the past and present being positioned as dual paradigms. How, then, do we meet and situate ourselves in the city as a site; how do we see it and render it not as a subject or scene, but as real conditions in time?

The Black Infrastructural Life of Sedimentary Circulations

Dele Adeyemo

Lagos is a megacity of twenty-four million people, where the legacies of slavery and colonialism have set in motion a great migration of an estimated two thousand people daily from across West Africa. As infrastructures of extraction—from the slave factory to the mega port—intensify development along the coastline, more and more people are drawn across a threshold of no return.

(Un)Social Community

Jesko Fezer

Since 2011, the Studio Experimental Design at the HFBK Hamburg has been offering support to people in the neighborhood of St. Pauli and elsewhere in the city who, for economic or socio-cultural reasons, do not have access or are prevented from wielding the agency of design.

Future Commoners

Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco

Among the most successful models in Latin America that have managed to foster a life in common across generations, many demonstrated that living beyond the ideology of capitalism can be sustained through an alliance between collective property and popular education.

Editorial

David Brown, arc en rêve, and e-flux Architecture

In Common is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, and ar…

Subject

Architecture, Community, Social Change

Contributors

David Brown, arc en rêve, and e-flux Architecture Editorial
Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco Future Commoners
Jesko Fezer (Un)Social Community
Dele Adeyemo The Black Infrastructural Life of Sedimentary Circulations
Anna Nnenna Abengowe The Flaneuse and the Fugitive Brief
Meriem Chabani Hidden Mosques, Quiet Atrophy
Elisa Iturbe and Stanley Cho Transgressing Immutable Lines
Huda Tayob Precarious Homes
Mawena Yehouessi Collective Common Crew
Ethel Baraona Pohl A support structure made of timber, care, and affect

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