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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN SPACE ARE ALWAYS POLITICAL  
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George Themistokleous
August 7, 2025
LSE Review of Books
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_ The contributors to this latest volume of the Routledge Handbook of
Architecture, Urban Space and Politics offer a wide ranging discussion
about social justice-oriented responses to the politics of our
constructed, lived environment. _

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_The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics,
Volume II Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities_
Edited By Nikolina Bobic, Farzaneh Haghighi
Routledge
ISBN: 9780367629182

While critiques of the politics of space emerged primarily from
adjacent disciplines – philosophy, sociology, geography – Jeremy
Till’s _Architecture Depends_ 
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stands out as a significant intervention from within the architectural
discourse itself. It re-invigorated debates around architecture’s
autonomy and revealed its deep entanglement with the messy realities
of social life. Since then, a growing body of scholarship has
interrogated the political dimensions of the built environment. This
new volume, edited by Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi builds on
and complicates that trajectory by bringing together diverse voices
across a range of political issues to examine how architectural
knowledge might confront its problematic past – a legacy of
complicity with neoliberal governance, and of abetting imperial and
fascist regimes of power – and move beyond it. The editors mobilise
alternative spatial imaginaries and pose an urgent question that
permeates the volume: if architecture is always already political,
what is to be done? 

Reimagining spatial practice 

The introductory chapter by Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi
situates architecture and urban space within broader socio-political
concerns. From the outset, the authors assert that the discourse must
face social realities such as exclusion, marginality, discrimination,
and inequality. They call for modes of democratic co-existence
through, for example, more inclusive participatory design processes.
As they claim, architects need to “take a position against the
inequalities and ethically/morally wrong practices that crises of our
time have created, otherwise they lose their social relevance” (6).
But this urgent call for a shift, according to the editors, must also
navigate existing political frameworks and resist reductive binaries
such as top-down vs. bottom-up. They frame this as an ethical
imperative, and call on those with a stake in the production of space
to act.

Following Gilles Deleuze’s notion of using theory as a ‘box of
tools,’ the handbook provides conceptual tools for alternative
spatial practices – ones that may catalyse a “slow” revolution
from within the discipline

The volume does more than simply consolidate theoretical positions;
rather, it invites intervention and rethinking of spatial praxis. In
this sense, it can be influential for all those engaged in spatial
practice today. It is especially useful for younger generations who
must navigate an increasingly complex field of socio-political
challenges. Following Gilles Deleuze’s notion of using theory as a
“box of tools,”
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the handbook provides conceptual tools for alternative spatial
practices – ones that may catalyse a “slow” revolution from
within the discipline, as the editors suggest.  

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s _The Archaeology of Knowledge_
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_(2013, originally published 1969), the book’s discursive format –
spanning 36 chapters – is not a static repository, but a stratified
field of statements. These contributions reflect the current pulse of
political and ecological challenges confronting architecture. As
Foucault reminds us, discursive formations do “not accumulate
endlessly” (145); statements are governed by historical rules
determining what can be said, by whom, and under what conditions. 

The volume’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration […
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calls for alliances between urban researchers, artists, engineers,
lawyers, and activists to challenge the paradigms of the
Anthropocene-Capitalocene

Structured across five sections – _Events and Dissidence_;
_Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire_; _Climate and Ecology_; _Urban
Commons and Social Participation_; and _Marginalities and
Postcolonialism_ – the volume offers a navigational framework for
the reader. Each section opens with an introductory essay that helps
chart the themes, drawing transversal links across the book. The case
studies – skateparks, hospitals, rural communities, urban squares,
digital environments, abandoned buildings – show how a spatial
praxis can inform acts of resistance. In this light, the handbook is
not a unified narrative but a differential collective murmur of
interventions – whether ground-level or speculative – that reveal
the potentialities of a critical architecture. 

Collective resistance and colonial spatial violence

The volume’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration is
evident throughout, beginning in the introduction, which calls for
alliances between urban researchers, artists, engineers, lawyers, and
activists to challenge the paradigms of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene.
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plurality resonates with global movements such as Black Lives Matter
and Indigenous land right struggles. The chapters examine how such
critical concepts are enacted spatially. For example, the chapter,
“Spatializing Queer Ecologies” by C. Greig Crysler et al.,
explores queer ambivalence through a prehistory of queer ecological
spaces that challenge binary, patriarchal ideas of nature and the
greenwashing they often support. One such place is Druid Heights
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proto-queer anarchist community, which embraces non-binary sexualities
and multi-species cohabitation, while critiquing settler colonial
legacies. Their models of communal living, non-exclusive partnerships,
and ambivalent land ownership offer alternatives for inhabiting space
in the face of planetary collapse. 

From rural California to the dense urban Hong Kong, the
chapter, ”Commoning Technicities in Hong Kong’s Umbrella
Movement”  by Gerhard Bruyns and Stavros Kousoulas explores
collective politics during the 2014 protests through the lens of
affect theory
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What they term “guerrilla urbanism” emerges from mobilisation:
slogans on roads, encampments, makeshift structures, and barricades
– where built infrastructure and human agency are mediated through
technicity. According to the authors, “technicity deals with how
humans relate and transform their environment through technology and
how these relations transform all of them” in their own ways –
“humans, technology and environment” (70). Drawing on Brian
Massumi’s writing on affect
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they show how the Umbrella Movement produced a collective
defamiliarisation of urban space, resisting privatisation and enabling
an emergent commons.

Another important chapter is Nishat Awan’s “Atlas Otherwise”,
which seeks to dislocate colonial mapping, challenging dominant
Western representational models that are now replicated through
digital technologies. One example concerns Palestine, where satellite
imaging is limited by US military-imposed restrictions. As a result,
Palestinian territories remain selectively visible, reinforcing
asymmetries of sovereign control. Awan traces thick, material moments
that resist the clarity of colonial visuality, calling attention to
what colonial mapping conceals or excludes. For the author, Anuradha
Mathur and Dilip da Cunha’s work on Mumbai, particularly through the
project _Soak_ [[link removed]] (2009), offers
an alternative cartographic imagination. Mathur and da Cunha
reconceive terrain through their collaged sectional drawings – a
shifting “monsoon surface” – “drawn” by weather and local
practices like terracing
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challenge colonial mappings that misrepresent Mumbai as a static
territory. 

The volume’s ambition is to explore how architecture might
reconfigure social relations and contest the spatial logic of
capitalism

In Murray Fraser’s “Introduction to Marginalities and
Postcolonialism” – Part VI of the book – the author mentions a
pressing issue of political space today: Gaza. Gaza exemplifies
contemporary colonial spatial violence. Through policies of
displacement, and – what Sari Hanafi calls “spacio-cide”
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turns territory into a weapon of domination. In 2023 alone, over half
of Gaza’s buildings were destroyed,
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schools, and hospitals targeted. This is part of a broader
settler-colonial logic, where land becomes a mechanism for
marginalisation, dispossession, and the systematic erasure of
Palestinian life. The handbook also shows why such political matters
are of concern for architecture. Since Fraser’s introductory chapter
was written, the situation in Gaza has worsened into a humanitarian
catastrophe
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In this context, what agency can architecture still claim in the
world? 

The future of architecture 

Together, these examples underscore the volume’s ambition – to
explore how architecture might reconfigure social relations and
contest the spatial logic of capitalism. The concluding chapter,
“Robots, AI and Spatial Politics – Unpacking Potentials”, by
Dagmar Reinhardt, extends the volume’s scope into the politics of
emerging technologies. It highlights how AI and robotics are embedded
in new systems of algorithmic regulation, labour automation, and
surveillance. However, given the significance of these issues, the
chapter also reveals the need for a more extensive treatment of
digital architectures, algorithmic governance, and digital economy to
warrant its own section. Despite this, the volume effectively
positions architecture as having an important political role that
practitioners and researchers must address. For interdisciplinary
architectural teaching, as well as research, this handbook is a timely
and active resource that carries with it an activist urgency. It
invites readers to act and to design more inclusive architectures that
are situated and respond to our socio-political lives, reclaiming the
built environment as a space of ethical engagement. 

_NOTE:__ This review gives the views of the author and not the
position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of
Economics and Political Science._

George Themistokleous’ critical spatial research investigates the
role of the body within media assemblages in contested territories. He
is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Body Matters (Routledge, 2027),
and author of Towards a Cybernographic Architecture: Digital Power and
the Politics of Subjectivization (Routledge, 2028). He currently
teaches at Norwich University of the Arts and is founder of Para-sight
(www.para-sight.net [[link removed]]).

* architecture
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* Politics
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