Projects & Collaborations 5 foundShow per page10 10 20 50 Sinergia "Governing through design" Research Project | 2 Project MembersThe central question of this grant is: How does design govern today? We ask what work design - as an interdisciplinary approach to solving social, political and environmental problems - has done throughout the second half of the twentieth century to transform governmentality, and how the values of design continue to define governmental strategies in the 21st century. Since the postwar period, "design" has been increasingly called upon to solve problems caused by economic restructuring, political instability, and environmental disaster. Against this background, we do not take design simply as a product-oriented discipline but suggest that through its becoming central to governmentality, it requires a wider definition today. "Governing through Design" will be the first global and interdisciplinary study of how design governs in the 21st century. Such a study requires expertise from design studies, urban studies, architectural history, media studies, cultural anthropology, political science, and science and technology studies. Our team brings these disciplinary perspectives together in order to be able to examine the interdisciplinary nature of design today. Our research consortium consists of the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel, the faculty of Urban Studies at the University of Basel and the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University, Montréal. Making Infrastructure Global? Design and Governance of Infrastructural Expansion in the Global South Research Project | 2 Project MembersContemporary infrastructure projects often look alike, produced as they are by planning agencies that operate across the world in public-private partnerships. This global production of infrastructure-ranging from oil pipelines and plants to power grids and dams-is rapidly transforming the Global South and its relationship with the rest of the world, yet a deeper understanding of its design and governance is lacking. Much analysis of contemporary infrastructure investment ignores the colonial legacies of infrastructure planning. Infrastructures, imagined as generic artefacts of modernity and projects of technical improvement, are only seemingly apolitical and frequently reproduce global inequalities. The reliance of postcolonial states on global financial institutions and experts for their infrastructural development implies unequal power relations, but developmentalist studies tend to naturalize these. This interdisciplinary project combines approaches from urban studies and political science to explore the role of global planning agencies and colonial legacies in transnational infrastructural expansion in the Global South. Based on three cases of energy infrastructure projects in East Africa, North Africa and Latin America, this research analyzes the contested power dynamics triggered by attempts at making infrastructure global. With EUCOR seed money, the partners will establish a cross-border research platform and develop a proposal for DFG/SNF or ERC funding. Territorial Design: How Infrastructure Shaped Territory in Africa Research Project | 3 Project MembersInfrastructure is central to understanding global urbanization today, yet the historical production of our infrastructural lifeworlds continues to be neglected, especially for the African context. Scholarly emphasis on the informal, unplanned character of African urbanization has obscured the historical role of physical infrastructure in this process. This project addresses these shortcomings by focusing on large-scale infrastructure as a matter of design, with often far-reaching consequences for urban and rural territories across Africa. During both the colonial and post-independence periods, planners, engineers, architects, and government officials consciously attempted to reshape Africa through specific infrastructural projects. Such projects had various goals, from facilitating resource exploitation and strengthening colonial control to integrating the continent into a Pan-African unity after independence and facilitating economic development today. This project examines key infrastructural visions as well as their material realizations and often contradictory effects on the ground. We focus on transportation infrastructure to analyze how such projects spurred urbanization and changed relations between settlements and hinterlands. The aim is to reveal how the design of infrastructure shaped African territories, from the first colonial modernization projects and the ambitious plans of the post-independence era to the continent's infrastructure boom today. Research findings will not only be relevant to the fields of urban studies and the history of architecture and urbanism, but will also provide useful insights to architects, planners, and policymakers currently engaged with infrastructure development in Africa. The Power of Infrastructure: Migration Management, Statecraft and Infrastructural Design in the Mediterranean Borderscape Research Project | 5 Project MembersThis project proposes a comparative, interdisciplinary and multi-‐sited exploration of the infrastructure of migration management in five countries located in the Mediterranean borderscape (Greece, Italy, Libya, Tunisia, Turkey). Consisting of a pluridisciplinary research team of political scientists, architects and sociologists, it will examine and compare the infrastructure of the new Hotspot approach of the EU both in the operational hotspot facilities in Greece and Italy, as well in its complementary extensions in Turkey, Tunisia and Libya. The research will provide a visual mapping and documentation to grasp the physical scope of this infrastructure in the Mediterranean borderscape. To examine the hotspots as an infrastructure space the project will also conduct comparative ethnographic analysis to explore the complex interactions between government policies (at the EU and member state levels), technical apparatuses (from fences to fingerprinting devices), security and humanitarian practices (such as border patrolling and search-‐and rescue operations), consultancy expertise, and political contestation of by citizens and non-‐citizens (at the local and international level). The project aims to develop a new framework for the analysis of the power of infrastructure in migration management that deciphers how infrastructure not only enables migration policies but reconfigures social and political relations in the affected localities and beyond. To deepen the interdisciplinary approach, we plan a one-‐week research studio in collaboration with our partner organizations and associated members. To ensure a wide dissemination of the project results, a documentary and exhibition is planned in in addition to the scientific publications. The concrete project output comprises two peer-‐ reviewed articles, co-‐authored by research team, an edited volume based on the research studio, a research blog, a final public workshop, an exhibition and exhibition catalogue, and a video documentary. Neoliberalism: An Architectural History Research Project | 1 Project MembersRecent scholarship on the postwar period has significantly revised our understanding of architectural modernism, by examining the complex role of architecture in larger historical processes such as the expansion of the welfare state, decolonization, and Cold War modernization and development. In doing so, such scholarship implicitly or explicitly posits the 1970s as a historical break, dually marked by economic restructuring and the advent of a new cultural condition. While innovative studies are currently being pursued on the architecture of this period, the concrete agents of this historical shift continue to be obscured by recourse to black-boxed terms such as "postmodernism" and "neoliberalism." Yet what exactly is the historical relationship between architecture-whether we call it postmodern or not-and the so-called neoliberal turn? In answering this question, the edited volume develops new analytical and methodological approaches to the more recent history of architecture. The changing relationship between state, society, and economy during and since the 1970s is often shorthanded with the rubric of neoliberalism. Yet the term itself describes an economic theory whose roots long precede the specific policies of privatization, deregulation, and market reform of the Thatcher and Reagan era. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this book examines the actual role of architecture in neoliberalization-indicating a historically and geographically specific process rather than a blanket condition. 1 1
Sinergia "Governing through design" Research Project | 2 Project MembersThe central question of this grant is: How does design govern today? We ask what work design - as an interdisciplinary approach to solving social, political and environmental problems - has done throughout the second half of the twentieth century to transform governmentality, and how the values of design continue to define governmental strategies in the 21st century. Since the postwar period, "design" has been increasingly called upon to solve problems caused by economic restructuring, political instability, and environmental disaster. Against this background, we do not take design simply as a product-oriented discipline but suggest that through its becoming central to governmentality, it requires a wider definition today. "Governing through Design" will be the first global and interdisciplinary study of how design governs in the 21st century. Such a study requires expertise from design studies, urban studies, architectural history, media studies, cultural anthropology, political science, and science and technology studies. Our team brings these disciplinary perspectives together in order to be able to examine the interdisciplinary nature of design today. Our research consortium consists of the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel, the faculty of Urban Studies at the University of Basel and the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University, Montréal.
Making Infrastructure Global? Design and Governance of Infrastructural Expansion in the Global South Research Project | 2 Project MembersContemporary infrastructure projects often look alike, produced as they are by planning agencies that operate across the world in public-private partnerships. This global production of infrastructure-ranging from oil pipelines and plants to power grids and dams-is rapidly transforming the Global South and its relationship with the rest of the world, yet a deeper understanding of its design and governance is lacking. Much analysis of contemporary infrastructure investment ignores the colonial legacies of infrastructure planning. Infrastructures, imagined as generic artefacts of modernity and projects of technical improvement, are only seemingly apolitical and frequently reproduce global inequalities. The reliance of postcolonial states on global financial institutions and experts for their infrastructural development implies unequal power relations, but developmentalist studies tend to naturalize these. This interdisciplinary project combines approaches from urban studies and political science to explore the role of global planning agencies and colonial legacies in transnational infrastructural expansion in the Global South. Based on three cases of energy infrastructure projects in East Africa, North Africa and Latin America, this research analyzes the contested power dynamics triggered by attempts at making infrastructure global. With EUCOR seed money, the partners will establish a cross-border research platform and develop a proposal for DFG/SNF or ERC funding.
Territorial Design: How Infrastructure Shaped Territory in Africa Research Project | 3 Project MembersInfrastructure is central to understanding global urbanization today, yet the historical production of our infrastructural lifeworlds continues to be neglected, especially for the African context. Scholarly emphasis on the informal, unplanned character of African urbanization has obscured the historical role of physical infrastructure in this process. This project addresses these shortcomings by focusing on large-scale infrastructure as a matter of design, with often far-reaching consequences for urban and rural territories across Africa. During both the colonial and post-independence periods, planners, engineers, architects, and government officials consciously attempted to reshape Africa through specific infrastructural projects. Such projects had various goals, from facilitating resource exploitation and strengthening colonial control to integrating the continent into a Pan-African unity after independence and facilitating economic development today. This project examines key infrastructural visions as well as their material realizations and often contradictory effects on the ground. We focus on transportation infrastructure to analyze how such projects spurred urbanization and changed relations between settlements and hinterlands. The aim is to reveal how the design of infrastructure shaped African territories, from the first colonial modernization projects and the ambitious plans of the post-independence era to the continent's infrastructure boom today. Research findings will not only be relevant to the fields of urban studies and the history of architecture and urbanism, but will also provide useful insights to architects, planners, and policymakers currently engaged with infrastructure development in Africa.
The Power of Infrastructure: Migration Management, Statecraft and Infrastructural Design in the Mediterranean Borderscape Research Project | 5 Project MembersThis project proposes a comparative, interdisciplinary and multi-‐sited exploration of the infrastructure of migration management in five countries located in the Mediterranean borderscape (Greece, Italy, Libya, Tunisia, Turkey). Consisting of a pluridisciplinary research team of political scientists, architects and sociologists, it will examine and compare the infrastructure of the new Hotspot approach of the EU both in the operational hotspot facilities in Greece and Italy, as well in its complementary extensions in Turkey, Tunisia and Libya. The research will provide a visual mapping and documentation to grasp the physical scope of this infrastructure in the Mediterranean borderscape. To examine the hotspots as an infrastructure space the project will also conduct comparative ethnographic analysis to explore the complex interactions between government policies (at the EU and member state levels), technical apparatuses (from fences to fingerprinting devices), security and humanitarian practices (such as border patrolling and search-‐and rescue operations), consultancy expertise, and political contestation of by citizens and non-‐citizens (at the local and international level). The project aims to develop a new framework for the analysis of the power of infrastructure in migration management that deciphers how infrastructure not only enables migration policies but reconfigures social and political relations in the affected localities and beyond. To deepen the interdisciplinary approach, we plan a one-‐week research studio in collaboration with our partner organizations and associated members. To ensure a wide dissemination of the project results, a documentary and exhibition is planned in in addition to the scientific publications. The concrete project output comprises two peer-‐ reviewed articles, co-‐authored by research team, an edited volume based on the research studio, a research blog, a final public workshop, an exhibition and exhibition catalogue, and a video documentary.
Neoliberalism: An Architectural History Research Project | 1 Project MembersRecent scholarship on the postwar period has significantly revised our understanding of architectural modernism, by examining the complex role of architecture in larger historical processes such as the expansion of the welfare state, decolonization, and Cold War modernization and development. In doing so, such scholarship implicitly or explicitly posits the 1970s as a historical break, dually marked by economic restructuring and the advent of a new cultural condition. While innovative studies are currently being pursued on the architecture of this period, the concrete agents of this historical shift continue to be obscured by recourse to black-boxed terms such as "postmodernism" and "neoliberalism." Yet what exactly is the historical relationship between architecture-whether we call it postmodern or not-and the so-called neoliberal turn? In answering this question, the edited volume develops new analytical and methodological approaches to the more recent history of architecture. The changing relationship between state, society, and economy during and since the 1970s is often shorthanded with the rubric of neoliberalism. Yet the term itself describes an economic theory whose roots long precede the specific policies of privatization, deregulation, and market reform of the Thatcher and Reagan era. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this book examines the actual role of architecture in neoliberalization-indicating a historically and geographically specific process rather than a blanket condition.
