Public Perception of Spatial Justice
Edward Soja postulates that critical spatial thinking today hinges around three principles.
- The ontological spatiality of being (we are all spatial as well as social and temporal beings)
- The social production of spatiality (space is socially produced and can therefore be socially changes).
- The socio-spatial dialectic (the spatial shapes the social as much as the social shapes the spatial)
For me this immediately brings to mind how much public
perception of space can affect the kinds of spaces that shape our environment. The
image I shared above is a screenshot I took of the top comment on the Clemson
School of Architecture Facebook post about last year's COTE 10 competition, it
gave me a good laugh. In all seriousness, it’s troubling that there are people
who associate architecture that is for the people, the community, or the environment
as being “communist.” Why are Americans like this? And what can we do to change
that perception? Because if what Edward Soja is saying is true, these kinds of
thoughts can directly affect how our built environment is shaped.
I’m curious what someone who would call the COTE 10 projects
“communist” would call Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio projects, perhaps those
are a perfect starter point for that kind of person to see the real benefit of
making architecture that is simple, free of pretension and objectively good for
a community. Maybe that kind of thinking could penetrate ones dense and fearful
mind into thinking that maybe these “communist” ideas aren’t so bad after all.
I think this is a really unique 'real life, close to home' example that mirrors Soja's ideas. The general public who may know very little about architecture often have a preconceived notion about what they think certain buildings should look like, which often results in misinformed opinions about architecture. While I do think after a certain point it can be hard to inform people about spatial justice in architecture (see this facebook comment thread for an example), there are many ways we can use architecture to inform people. I think Rural Studio is a good example, especially in scale, that people can to begin to understand these ideas, so creating more opportunities in architecture to do this type of work could go a long way.
ReplyDeleteI feel as though this topic almost goes back to when we discussed social housing. I worked in a firm that did a lot of low-income apartment complexes and most of the responses I got were along the lines of ‘oh…’ or ‘that doesn’t sound very fun to design’. That feels like a very American response, like you mentioned. Other countries seem to have such a different opinion on it, or at least their architects have a different approach. Maybe when more American architects are inventive with social housing, more of us will catch on.
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