The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology: Contemporary Approaches to a Cross-Disciplinary Field

This handbook provides fresh insights into the debates and challenges that unfold in the cross-disciplinary field of architecture and anthropology. Based on studies of empirical contexts across the globe, the authors launch and test a broad variety of methods and advance various theoretical concepts.

Architecture and anthropology have always had overlapping interests, but a range of developments in both areas make it more relevant than ever to intersect, overlap, combine or even merge the two disciplines. In anthropology, the spatial, material, and nonhuman turns have paved the way for an increasing interest in, and need for, of changing the world, rather than just studying it. On the other hand, architecture, beyond designing structures, has become interested in the uses and processes that unfold in, during, and after construction. The contemporary research and practices in both disciplines are testimonies that a cross-disciplinary exchange is inspiring for engaging with, and responding to, the challenges of a world in ecological, societal, and political turmoil.

This handbook addresses established scholars, students, and practitioners alike by outlining contemporary developments and tensions at the intersection of architecture and anthropology.

Marie Stender is an anthropologist and senior researcher in the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her research focuses on architectural anthropology, disadvantaged neighbourhoods, urban-domestic boundaries, place-making, and social sustainability. She has founded the Nordic Research Network of Architectural Anthropology and co-edited the Routledge anthology Architectural Anthropology - Exploring Lived Space (with Claus Bech-Danielsen and Aina Landsverk Hagen, 2021).

Claus Bech-Danielsen is an architect and a professor in the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is a housing researcher working in the field between architectural space and social life. In his research he is focusing on postwar mass housing and on the development of social and environmental sustainability in disadvantaged housing areas. He was chief editor at Nordic Journal of Architectural Research for a decade and co-edited the Routledge anthology Architectural Anthropology - Exploring Lived Space (with Marie Stender and Aina Landsverk Hagen, 2021).

Aina Landsverk Hagen is a research professor of Social Anthropology at The Oslo Metropolitan University, with a PhD on architects’ collaborative creativity. She has published extensively on youth participation in urban development, innovation, organizational change, trans-disciplinary methods and action research. She co-edited the Routledge anthologies Media Management and Digital Transformation (with Arne L. Bygdås and Stewart Clegg, 2019) and Architectural Anthropology - Exploring Lived Space (with Marie Stender and Claus Bech-Danielsen, 2021).

Madlen Kobi is a social anthropologist and assistant professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research and teaching focuses on architectural anthropology, waste, infrastructure, urban political ecology, circular construction, and material culture with a regional focus on China and Europe. She co-edited the anthology Coping with Urban Climates. Comparative Perspectives on Architecture and Thermal Governance (with Sascha Roesler and Lorenzo Stieger, Birkhäuser 2022) and published her research in journals such as Visual Studies, Social Anthropology, Urban Studies, Roadsides, Eurasian Geography and Economics or the International Journal of Urban and Rural Research.

Ying Zhou is an architect and urban theorist teaching at the University of Hong Kong. Her research on the urban transformations of Shanghai, contextualizing contemporary developments in the institutional frameworks and historical legacies of the city, was published in the book Urban Loopholes: Creative Alliances of Spatial Productions in Shanghai’s City Center (2017). Her current research looks at how the burgeoning of contemporary visual art spaces manifest the shifts in the arts ecologies of East Asian cities, and their intersections with heritage conservation, architectural reuse, gentrification, and the rhetorics of creative cities.