Si el futuro es femenino, ¿por qué no defender a todas las diseñadoras femeninas? Será que podemos redefinir el éxito y diseñar una profesión basada en el cariño hacia nosotras mismas como hacia los demás?

If the future is female why not stand up for all female-identifying designers? Can we redefine success and craft a meaningful career caring for us and others?

Pensamientos | Thoughts

 If we want to change the way architecture and planning are practiced, we first need to change the way they are taught

Dalia Milián Bernal

About a year ago, I attended the master thesis defense of a friend of mine, an Iranian woman, who is a feminist, an activist and an architect. The aim of her work was to develop a method inspired in Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed that would facilitate non-verbal communication in participatory planning processes. To test the method, she opened a call in different languages inviting people from different countries to attend a meeting that would take place inside a yurt, as to create a more intimate environment. The yurt was placed in a suburb about 7 km from the the European city where I live and according to my friend, the activity was well attended. The stories she told about the experience were quite interesting. She had found that the method had managed to bring together migrants from different parts of the world with locals and to communicate with one another through movement, not words. She then explained, that after testing her method, she analysed her experience through a Foucaultian lens – namely through power relationships. Needles to say, I found her work and presentation fascinating. 

Then it was time for her opponent to take the stage. At the beginning, the critique was good, the opponent, a male professor of planning, confessed it was the first time he had heard of the work of Foucault and he found the theoretical underpinning very interesting. However, it seemed to him that the method was a bit naive, because at some point in planning verbal communication is needed. He also argued that in the process of planning there are “very nice people” but also “very mean people”, such as urban developers, and asked her why she had not invited them to the table. 

Let me explain what is at stake here: there he is, a male professor of planning telling the female student that things cannot change! That above all, the status quo shall prevail. 

To be clear, an urban developer should not be invited to the table, first and foremost, because urban developers are not elected entities, they do not represent the interests of the folk nor the interests of the planet, their interest remains in making money, regardless of the method and completely uninterested in the consequences. That a professor of planning asked such a question represents the locus of the problem, if we want to change the way architecture and planning are practiced, we first need to change the way they are taught: often completely isolated from the communities that surround them and the different disciplines that are implicated, constantly rewarding individual performance, and continuously feeding and reproducing the same neoliberal system, a system obsessed with competition and growth.

The year my friend graduated, non of the professorships of the school of architecture where she did her studies were held by women professors, not a single one! Maybe we should begin there, but let us not stop there. Let us start talking to students of architecture and planning about the power structures that are at play when we plan cities and produce buildings, not to work with them or around them, but to change them! Let’s stop teaching them how to “negotiate with clients”. Rather, let’s explain to them why cities and buildings should not be treated as commodities to be consumed, why in treating them as such, we are damaging the livelihoods of many, depleting the natural environment and exacerbating the climate crisis. Let’s stop teaching them to view the world through a monitor, because then they cannot see for themselves that there are real people living in the most inhuman of conditions; that there are neighbourhoods in the city that lack the most basic infrastructure; that there are public spaces that have been completely privatised: and public spaces are the spheres that we use to achieve change, that is why they cannot be conceived of as spaces for consumption. Let us teach them that public spaces are part of the political arenas where we can all demand our egalitarian rights. Let us teach them about Lefebre’s and Harvey’s notion of the Right to the City, and then, let us learn together how we can, in the words of David Harvey, exercise our “collective right over the processes of urbanization”, and in doing so, lets transform ourselves and our role as architects and planners within our societies.

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Próxima Interrogativa | Next Interrogative

¿Qué procesos de urbanización ayudan a exacerbar el problema del racismo en nuestras ciudades? Y, ¿qué se puede hacer, o se está haciendo, para revertir dichos procesos?

Formato: Varias voces|Recepción de textos: 31.07.2020

How are processes of urbanization helping exacerbate the problem of racism in our cities? And, what can, or is being done, to revert such processes?

Format: Various voices|Submission deadline: 31.07.2020