Recoding Architecture - Moving Beyond Ownership

While our scientific discoveries and technological development have reached unforeseen imaginaries, our societies are on the edge of a cliff, driven by a perfect storm of the effects of climate change, accelerating automation and growing inequality.

Whilst we set increasingly ambitious targets, our capacity to imagine & practice in the development of new human environments seems entirely broken and captured by the perceived truth of our institutions, rights and our economies- from ownership to planning.
Throughout this series, we will discuss with critical necessity the need to renew how we understand the dark matter of our built environment, reimagining the deep codes of urbanism, our means of organising for change in a complex world and the subject of our reality what it means to be human in our increasingly dense, intense and conflicted cities in the face of a radical transition.

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Moving Beyond Ownership : Moving Beyond Ownership: Our cities and their governance and operations are increasingly controlled by a black box society (spatial computing and internet of things) driven by privatised monopoly logics. This is challenging the foundations of primacy and privacy in urban space. The deeply entrenched injustices hidden beyond social norms and rules (white supremacy, micro-racism, epigenetic inequality) trickle down to our algorithmic governance, risking damaging, irreversibly, our already feeble social contract.

This crisis calls for a radical rethinking of proprietorship and agency structures. Across this session, we will discuss the unique and unprecedented space to envision a post-ownership world and to fundamentally rethink our relationship to land, to nature and our practices of togetherness, within and between cities. Opening up a context where we can challenge and transform our current governance models and explore new ways of constituting, perhaps even beyond the “city-state” model that perpetuates inequality and unsustainability.

Once our interconnected and finite world is no longer ignorable, once feedback loops are hitting us harder then ever before… might we possible inform with Indigenous knowledges and ways of being our limited legal structures with other models of lawing and owning?

Reading List: Dark Matter Laboratories, Civic-Indigenous 7.0: 7 points of convergence towards civic and Indigenous futures, 2020;