Back to School 2022
As a public humanities venue committed to exploring urgent topics, PLATFORM has since its inception in June 2019, published 238 articles that, together, address core concerns of our fields—and of the general public—from social inequity and white supremacy to environmental crisis and the devastation of war. The short-form, lucid writing that we support with multiple media also make these articles suitable for the classroom.
Last year around this time, we highlighted two sets of articles on teaching and pedagogy. The first set focused on the social and environmental responsibilities of practitioners, and the second set addressed the need to decolonize syllabi. As many of our readers get back to teaching and are considering what to assign on matters that are urgent and need sustained reflection or creative thinking, we are publishing this look back at articles in three areas: pedagogy, social justice and equity, and creative solutions to precarity.
Pedagogy
The first set, on pedagogy, revisits the need to decolonize our classrooms and considers the relationships between teaching, archives, and field research in this effort.
Ocular-centricity can be blinding. Our disciplines of architecture, landscape, planning, and preservation are all beholden to Western visual ways of knowing that prevent us from attending to other sensory modes through which we learn and inhabit. In “Stories from the Flatlands,” Arijit Sen critiques this bias in architectural history, and through a case study of Vliet Street in Milwaukee, offers a methodological template to understand the process through which neighborhoods inhabited by racial minorities are depleted of value, and how we might read these landscapes otherwise. It leads us, for example, to consider how soundscapes of a city might be brought into architectural imagination and what we miss when we assume daytime field research to be sufficient.
Citation: Arijit Sen, “Stories from the Flatlands,” PLATFORM, Sep 28, 2020.
Figure 1. Image of a vacant lot and boarded up building in Milwaukee’s Northside. © Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School, 2017.
To resist the effects of settler colonialism in the classroom we must acknowledge the ways in which academic disciplines, including architectural history, benefit from it. How do we proceed with such acknowledgement? How do we incorporate Indigenous epistemologies in our syllabi and curricula? In “Lessons from Hawai‘i,” Kelema Lee Moses tells us how in 2019 she invited her students to collaborate with her in building her seminar on Pacific Island built environments and examining these as part of, and separate from, U.S. hegemony. Fostering a “liberatory learning environment” empowered students to recenter architectural histories from stylistic analysis to “ongoing epistemic and physical assault of settler colonialism on land, sovereignty, and the built environment of the Pacific.”
Citation: Kelema Lee Moses, “Lessons from Hawai‘i,” PLATFORM, Oct 19, 2020.
In his post “Towards Equitable Histories of Ancient Built Environments,” John R. Senseney challenges students of classical environments to engage with the analysis of imperialism. Though “whiteness” did not exist in Classical civilizations, forms of racial suprematism were evident throughout the Greek and Roman Empires. Taking two classical monuments, the Parthenon and the Pantheon, he demonstrates how students may productively tap into the experience of the construction workers, rather than elite architects, to begin uncovering the agency of ancient builders and their resistance to imperialism.
Citation: John R. Senseney, “Towards Equitable Histories of Ancient Built Environments,” PLATFORM, May 16, 2022.
Social Justice and Equity
A majority of articles published in PLATFORM address social justice and equity in some form. From among these, we highlight three that focus on the continuing challenges that marginalized populations encounter in public space.
With interstate borders sealed and transportation restricted during a COVID-19 lockdown, thousands of migrant workers in India traveled long distances by foot, for days, risking exhaustion, automobile accidents, and other dangers. In “Co-spatiality and Dissent: The Migrant Workers’ Walk in Retrospect,” Avishek Ray argues that despite the migrants’ vulnerability, their walking, at a time of restricted mobility and enhanced control, was an act of dissent. Through walking on highways and railway tracks, not only did migrants defy restrictions on their movement, but they also reclaimed these spaces by inhabiting them in ways other than their designated uses. Walking, thus, shows how competing actors shape the meaning of public spaces—urging us to broaden our understanding of who can occupy social spaces and in what ways.
Citation: Avishek Ray, “Co-spatiality and Dissent: The Migrant Workers’ Walk in Retrospect,” PLATFORM, Feb 14, 2022.
In “Lessons from the Participatory Clinic: Architecture and Abortion at the Feminist Women’s Health Centers,” M. C. Overholt discusses the legacy and architectural value of the Feminist Women’s Health Centers (FWHC), a collection of abortion clinics established in 1972. Written before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Overholt makes a case for a new spatial politics of women’s health, one centered around participation, collectivity, direct engagement, care, and self-help. The FWHC was built around such tenets: its clinics embraced a cyclical circulation pattern in which women entered and left the building using the same door, allowing for conversations to occur about women’s experiences. Walls in FWHC clinics served as sites of personal expression as well as protective infrastructure in the face of anti-abortion attacks in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Citation: M. C. Overholt, “Lessons from the Participatory Clinic: Architecture and Abortion at the Feminist Women’s Health Centers,” PLATFORM, Dec 13, 2021.
The coastal city of Acre, writes Mahdi Sabbagh, is plagued by the dispossession of its Palestinian occupants. In “Dispossession and Resistance in the City of Acre,” Sabbagh describes the challenges Palestinians face due to exclusionary Israeli policies. Many Palestinians living in the Old City have been stripped of home ownership, thanks to the 1950 “Absentee Law” that transferred the property of many Palestinians to the Israeli state. Today, about one-third of the city is Palestinian, but most of them have been compelled to rent property that they once owned. Palestinians are routinely excluded from the city’s public spaces, including beaches and cultural institutions, and are subject to what many view as a campaign of racial segregation. Sabbagh wonders what the city might be like if Palestinians were not branded as a “weaker population” and were allowed to fully assert themselves in public spaces?
Citation: Mahdi Sabbagh, “Dispossession and Resistance in the City of Acre,” PLATFORM, May 2, 2022.
Fig. 2. View of the often empty Courtyard at the Crusader Citadel in Acre. The Citadel, despite it holding one of the few open spaces in the city, is ticketed and as such most of Acre's residents do not spend time there, 2021. Photography by Mahdi Sabbagh.
Creative Solutions to Precarity
PLATFORM has published several articles that discuss creative solutions to social and economic precarity that require rethinking the parameters of architecture. Here are three examples.
Pablo Landa takes us to the migrant shelters built beyond the aegis of the state in “Building the City of God in Tijuana: How Migrant Shelters are Transforming Mexican Urban Landscapes” to demonstrate the emergence of new forms of communal living that refuse state– and capital-led strategies of containment and exploitation. Landa discusses the spiritual support offered by these shelters—Embajadores de Jesús in Tijuana, CASA INDI in Monterrey, and El Refugio in Guadalajara—all led by charismatic leaders, to explain the promise of reinvention these shelters offer. Here migrants fleeing violence and poverty are seen as agents in the creation of new communities, rather than being perceived as a threat or as an expendable population.
Citation: Pablo Landa, “Building the City of God in Tijuana: How Migrant Shelters are Transforming Mexican Urban Landscapes” PLATFORM, Aug 31, 2020.
Figure 3. Aerial view of Tijuana and the wall dividing the United States and Mexico in June 2020. © Francisco Álvarez.
In the two-part piece, “Towards a Barefoot Architecture: A Conversation with Yasmeen Lari, Part I,” and “Part II,” published in English and Urdu, Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari and PLATFORM editor Kishwar Rizvi discuss Lari’s initiatives for socially responsible architecture and its roots in her earlier projects. In many ways, the trajectory of Lari’s work reflects larger trends in twentieth-century architecture: from a social-housing project in the 1970s to large postmodern commercial projects in the following decades to low-carbon building today, which she labels “Barefoot Social Architecture.” By documenting the past, as she’s done in her heritage conservation work, Lari shows that understanding historic building types is an essential component of innovation. When a deadly earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 shifted Lari’s attention towards providing ethical, low-cost design solutions in afflicted areas, it became a turning point of her career. In Part II, Lari details her experiments with low-cost and sustainable building materials and techniques that allowed for efficient and affordable rebuilding.
Citation: Yasmeen Lari and Kishwar Rizvi, “Towards a Barefoot Architecture: A Conversation with Yasmeen Lari, Part I,” PLATFORM, Aug 9, 2021. Yasmeen Lari and Kishwar Rizvi, “Towards a Barefoot Architecture: A Conversation with Yasmeen Lari, Part II,” PLATFORM, Aug 16, 2021.
In “Curbside Castle: Architecture and Aspiration at an Oakland Homeless Encampment,” Ben Jameson-Ellsmore visits the Fifth Street Natives homeless encampment in West Oakland, California. Encampments, noted for their architectural cohesion and accommodation of larger communities, have become common in Oakland since the 2008 recession, and reflect the prohibitive costs of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jameson-Ellsmore meets the manager of the encampment, Nikki Cooper, who shows him how the “Castle” protects itself physically as well as politically. In addition to layering barbed wire, plywood, and scrap metal to fortify walls, Castle residents hung on the exterior hand-painted signs proclaiming their citizenship and belonging. Constantly at risk of demolition by officials—an act that ignores the root causes of homelessness—Jameson-Ellsmore argues that the Castle is an expression not only of precarity but also of aspiration.
Citation: Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, “Curbside Castle: Architecture and Aspiration at an Oakland Homeless Encampment,” PLATFORM, Jan 17, 2022.
Citation
“Back to School,” PLATFORM, September 12, 2022.
