The research project state-space aims at identifying current and prospective instruments of state intervention into the production of the built environment within the European Union and beyond. These instruments will be interrogated not only as essential conditions for practice of architecture and urbanism but also, potentially, as its media and means.
Since the 1970s such processes as the neoliberalization of the economy, the decomposition of the Keynesian welfare state, globalization, and regionalization, have contributed to the illusion of the erosion of the state and, in the debates around architecture, to a distorted vision of the discipline as condemned to an uneven bi-polar struggle with overwhelming forces of the market. However, what appeared as its erosion, was a profound transformation of state power towards new multi-scalar and multi-centered forms of statehood, paralleled by a reorganization of instruments of state intervention into the production of space. Differentiated by specific legislative cultures of various countries, these instruments include financial regulations of real estate and mortgage markets; taxation; social housing programs; building law; procedures of patrimony protection; norms of ecological sustainability; policies of security; and management of urban social conflicts and conflicts around the ’rights to the city’.
The project state-space will contribute to the Berlage Institute 2009–2012 program New Forms of Welfare by interrogating in what ways these instruments shape urban forms and what is their performative role within the practice of architecture and urbanism.
Workshop 1: Biopolitics of Scale