UNSETTLEMENTS:
The Story
For something not to be fully known it follows that it is not unknown. You simply cannot not have both. But what does it take for something to persist as manifest obscurity through and through? What does it take for something to seem to be clear, so obvious that this very condition seems to hide so many other realities? This question might seem as speculative as its premise appears contrived. But to a growing number of urban residents in cities across the world, it does capture a certain register of their everyday engagements with each other and with the ways of arranging and ordering urban space that insist upon consistency and coherence across landscapes that are intensely disjointed. Here, we think of “estates” in European cities and the ways the inhabitants of these estates are both “set off” from the larger urban environment and, at the same time, are particularly suited for residents to “set off” from them into that larger environment; acting as a kind of platform.
Tower Hamlets, London, UKBy "estate", we cover a range of housing situations, from social housing to private "affordable" housing to migrant hostels and encampments. Even as we are aware that these categories have different meaning in different cities, we want to examine the ways in which the conventional modes of settlement are by definition unsettling. We want to look at the ways in which the inhabitants--who they are and what they are capable of doing--instead of being domesticated by the "estate", are continuously remaking themselves, often without any destination in the minds of policymakers, brokers, managers, activists or residents themselves.
Estates are being torn down, renovated, relocated, and built anew. They are both the harbingers of dangerous futures and the embodiment of the right to affordable housing. In this project, we seek to think through the interstices of such trajectories. What is the estate and who is it for? What happens there, not as a matter of empirical conviction, but as a residue of both what could happen and might be happening that conventional observation just doesn’t have access to? Across Europe the estate becomes the repository of inhabitants that social orders think they know all too well, and thus need to house in particular ways, and, conversely, those who they simply can’t “process” or “integrate” and thus need to be put somewhere. It is the syncopated and often ill-conceived attempts at making cities from the unsettlements of “real” estates that we want to examine.
A key driver for many cities is their capacity to synchronize different and contrasting registers of inconsistencies. Policies and interventions that work in one situation will have opposite effects in another. As such, trauma, societal disruption and precarity are operationalized with different implications and in ways that are not always readily translatable into definitive results. Who and what is vulnerable, what is supportive of viable collective life or not, and what constitute lives worth living are all matters that are inherently ambiguous, and for that same reason, may be converted into many different outcomes across a city or urban region.. This is less a matter of strategic maneuvers than a result of coincidental optimizations.
In this regard, if there is something that characterizes the current urban condition, it may be the meshwork of conversions, rescaling and re-spatialization of urban practices, localities and forms of livelihood that occur everywhere at all times. Built environments are continuously being built, torn down, ruined, neglected, repurposed, abandoned, resettled, and folded in to all kinds of imaginations and projects.
If social arrangements do not fit into any specific spatial ordering or topography in the city, maybe that is the way they truly work.
Tower Hamlets, London, UKInstruments of urban governance cannot leave these things alone; because they are never seen as sufficient in themselves. Everyone may search for the perfect solution, but the practice of constantly identifying imperfections becomes the very basis on which to enforce dependence upon both expertise and arbitrary decision-making. For, if things aren’t good enough, or there is a lot of uncertainty as to what exactly might be going on, eventually decisions have to be made regardless of how much you know about the situation or not.
So, if social arrangements do not fit into any specific spatial ordering or topography in the city, maybe that is the way they truly work. In such ambiguous terrains whose characteristics exceed what any scaling procedure can account for, how can we rely on critical urban objects - home, household, workplace, intimate space, outside and street - if their categorization is always tentative and even insufficient? Across multiple and inconsistent layers and stacks of the city, the simultaneous hardening and dissolution of categorical ensembles and territorial boundaries amplify the extent to which the relationships between built environments and social practices are replete with different dispositions.
We think that individuals living in crowded, dense and under-serviced areas are vulnerable to all kinds of problems, but then again, we never know for sure because we tend to engage these situations usually only from the perspective that they are problems already. We think that so-called homogenous, banal extended suburban regions are culturally deficient only because they don’t show the usual signs of dynamism.
Gellerup Housing Estate, Brabrand Municipality, Denmark