The modern city design adapts to the consumer behavior of its inhabitants. The city-dwellers, under various slogans and ideologies, are willing to pay for their apparent security and live in a soulless yet sheltered residential development spaces. The American visionary and architect Lebbeus Woods has recognized architecture as a political act. He also thought that most architects are egotistical, self-styled executives who consider themselves creators. In view of the increasing tendency of ghettoisation of public space in cities, a critical attitude has to be adapted. By analyzing the mechanisms of spatial segregation, I point to the architecture of resistance gaining in importance as a form of fulfilling utopia in the creation of an inclusive city.
The network of social links becomes a form of contestation in modern cities. In the light of that, this article takes a look at informal forms of living (nomadic lifestyle of Romani people, slums, illegal refugee camps), treating them as decentralised, autonomous spaces that function as a variation of a networked community. Self-built architecture ‘glued’ to conventional urban spaces results in ‘pirate utopias’, idiomatic forms of modern urbanisation. Through their ‘quiet transgression of the ordinary’ they challenge the binary division into public and private goods, the importance of order and control of public space, while breaking the frameworks of modernity.
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