The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume I: Violence, Spectacle and Data

For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently, architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event and therefore incapable of performing any political role. This handbook explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing.

Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems - from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change - this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and Mapping Landscapes and Big Data.

This first volume of the handbook frames cutting-edge contemporary debates and presents studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This Handbook will be of interest to anyone seeking to meaningfully disrupt the reduction of space to an oppressive or neutral backdrop of political realities.

Nikolina Bobic is an academic and an architect. After completing her PhD in Architecture at the University of Sydney, Australia - where she also taught - she migrated to the UK and is now based at the University of Plymouth. Nikolina has also lectured in Hong Kong and New Zealand. Engaging with the two disciplines in which she is trained, architecture and sociology, her research addresses the intersections of power, politics, and space in their oppressive and liberatory mechanisms. Nikolina is the author of Balkanization and Global Politics: Remaking Cities and Architecture (Routledge, 2019), and in 2020 she collaborated with Farzaneh Haghighi on the co-edited Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts thematic issue 20 ’Political Matters’.

Farzaneh Haghighi is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Architecture from The University of Sydney, Australia. Her research is concerned with the intersection of political philosophy, architecture and urbanism and her first book Is the Tehran Bazaar Dead? Foucault, Politics, and Architecture was published in July 2018 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Her research seeks new avenues to enrich our creative analysis of complex built environments through investigating the implications of critical and cultural theory for architectural knowledge.