Inter Alia -

The architecture of territorial transformations

Architecture is undergoing a set of negotiations and re-alignments that brings it towards a

constantly changing position. The relation between the form of the inhabited territories
and the institutional framework has never been a static one: the shifts, expansions and
modifications in the forms of contemporary polities are reflected in the material
configuration of their spaces of operation. The contemporary territory does not follow in
its evolution a linear movement, as it is promoted by a multitude of often competing
actors. For this plural nature, the contemporary territories have a dynamic and shifting
behaviour with increasing borders and boundaries marked by colonial, ethnic, racial,
gender, political, social, military, technological, cultural confrontations.

Yet these transitions are producing non-relational environments, where individual

trajectories overlap, merge and diffuse but rarely collide. Today, the notion of the city as a
site formed and moulded by political forces, shaped by confrontations and struggles,
presents itself as a complex amalgamation of individual spaces, distinct and separate in
their rationalities as in their material boundaries. A diffused space of individualities and
subjectivities, where the discourses produced in one domain rarely overlap and migrate
into other rationalities.

An architectural and urban analysis of the modalities adopted to outplay, moderate and
contain conflictual situations, can reveal a set of the specific and always mutable relations
between contemporary polity and space. Operating amidst an ecology of practices,
architecture is today re-articulating the relation between the objects it organises and
shapes, and the various forms of gathering of public concerns around them. As a form-
generating practice amongst other form-generating practices, architecture is today
confronted with a complex condition, where the situational analysis of the present cannot
be disjoined and independently understood from a diagnostic bearing on the possibilities
of transformation.

Architecture is today operating in such an ecology of practices: by acting in the world it

maintains that it will not cross and overcome its borders without transforming and
readdressing its initial motives. Operating amidst this ecological environment, architecture
is constantly operating through the intensification of differences and misunderstandings
with other practices. In order to analyse and form the contemporary spaces of operation
of human environments, architecture needs to operate through the re-invention of its own
possibilities and negotiate its position amidst other practices. Architecture is moving
away from being the major practice of the project, i.e. the rationality that predominantly
shapes and recast the future conditions of operation. Architecture is moving into a
territory where constant negotiations with other rationalities are conducted through terms
defined and contained in their predominant discourses and disciplines.

How can we understand the contemporary practices of architecture from the

constellation of individual and sectorial rationalities that do not concur to form and shape
relations, rather delimit and mark their boundaries? Can we see architecture operating in
a non-transformative mode? What would the operative conditions of architecture be away
from the city as a site of the political? In the negotiations and realignments with other
form-generating processes, what is architecture ready to dismiss and relinquish?
The very necessity of intervening into the world through design arises from a perception
of instability and precariousness. Away from the modernist notions of design and
architecture tracing the paths of future action, today we are operating a constant re-
evaluation of the conditions in which architecture operates: architecture is a probe for
exploring the transformation processes of the contemporary human environment, its
states of operation, and the many society-space relations. As we take a further step into
the shards of contemporaneity, uncertainty appears to be a ground condition in human
activities. If modernity mastered the construction of differentiated scenarios and the
evaluation of risk assessment and control, today the very rapid growth of expert and
sectorial rationalities and the many visions they project on the contemporary territory
creates a condition difficult to manage and even discern.

Can architecture operate as a technology to link contemporary forms of polity to

contemporary spaces? And would this imply a re-thinking of city forming away from
power, manipulation, submission and containment? Architecture, in order to make the city
do what it wants it to do, could certainly use force and constraints, it could think of
shaping and aligning political forces and economic drives towards a set of pre-
determined goals. Yet, as other disciplines have shown, it could engage in understanding
how the relation between material forms and contemporary polities are in transition.
Architecture could actively resist the idea of shaping and submitting the compounds and
complexes of contemporary global circulations and structures of citizenship to its own
wishes, it could actively engage in radical negotiations with the other practices that
equally shape territories and contemporary polities. Architecture is today needing to
renegotiate its agency in a territory in constant transformation. Architecture is often seen
as the modality to pare down and fix differences in sets of manageable oppositions and
equivalences, as the modality of moulding incommensurable positions into units. And at
the same time as a partial rationality among other partial rationalities: inter alia.

Territorial Agency / Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino

Territorial Agency is an independent organisation that combines architecture, analysis, advocacy and action
for integrated spatial transformation of contemporary territories. John and Ann-Sofi are unit masters at the
AA Architectural Association London. Ann-Sofi is a PhD research fellow at AHO, and she was previously a
researcher at ETH Studio Basel / Contemporary City Institute, and she has studied in Helsinki, Copenhagen
and Zurich. John is researching for his PhD at the Research Architecture Centre at Goldsmiths, where he
also teaches the MA. He has previously been Research Advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht
and head of Research at ETH Studio Basel and has co-founded Multiplicity. They are currently researching
the implications of the Anthropocene with the Anthropocene Observatory installation in the HKW House of
World Cultures in Berlin.