Work Session 1: Bureaucratic Manoeuvres Within
During periods of political transformation and turbulence, the relationship between freedom, justice and bureaucracy is crucial but over overlooked, sometimes even treated with suspicion. Bureaucratic Capture tackles this by exploring how bureaucratic forms and processes - through policy, legislation, protocol, assembly and/or constitution - can instead occupy and activate the threshold between “movements towards" and “structures of” spatial justice.
Over the course of the year we will bring legal scholars, municipal workers, policy writers, into conversation with architects, activists and campaigners to explore and develop a Bureaucracy from Below. From minorplanning to minimum standards to social and spatial contracts, we will ask: how can policy be built from the bottom up? How can municipal ministries deal with, and not dampen, struggles in the street? Can revolutions build contracts? Can contracts build revolutions?
In the first session we will be joined by architect Liza Fior and Cllr Aydin Dikerdem, Wandsworth Borough Council with whom we will unpack how design is an ongoing struggle over interpretation of the policy and regulatory frameworks by close reading of several projects of muf architecture, and commentary by Aydin Dikerdem which shows how struggle with bureaucracy around defining what, and especially for whom, public interest is, does not stop when one enters into the local governance, but intensifies.
Liza Fior is one of the founding partner of muf architecture /art and Professor of Architecture and Spatial Practise at UAL. Liza describes the unsolicited research underpinning all muf projects, as getting yourself out of the situations you put yourself in. The situations she refers to are muf's projects, all public spaces, urban design and master-planning to public furniture, via buildings, landscapes, streetscapes and buildings – a continual dialogue between detail and strategy. Value what's there, nurture the possible, define what’s missing sums up the design process. If you want to know more see @mufarchitectureart www.muf.co.uk
Cllr Aydin Dikerdem is the councillor for Queenstown Ward in the Battersea and Nine Elms area of Wandsworth, south west London, and the Cabinet Housing Member, whose housing activism brought him into politics. He is the author of the borough’s Homes for Wandsworth Mission Statement.
The session is part of Bureaucratic Captur: SoA Annual Research Programme organised by Dr Charlotte Grace and Dr Dubravka Sekulić, City Design MA.
