How to Spatially Mediate Conflicts?

Authors

  • Aleksandar Stanicic Delft University of Technology http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8208-9595
  • Marc Schoonderbeek Delft University of Technology
  • Heidi Sohn Delft University of Technology
  • Armina Pilav University of Sheffield

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.14.2.5374

Abstract

Various forms of violence and conflict continue to shape our habitats. What historically has been straightforward and even obvious two-way dependency, in recent years took more subtle and covert form due to sophisticated technological advancements in the fields of media, surveillance and armament. Recognising the detrimental effects of these new developments on the way we experience, conceptualise and build our environments, Footprint27 proposes artistic reflections, cross-media inquiry and counter-tactics as new powerful tools to rethink the complex relationship between conflict, space and mediation. On one hand, the aim of this issue is to deepen and expand theoretical considerations that substantiate investigations of spatial conflicts by making them truly interdisciplinary. On the other, it seeks to empower architects and artists in their pursuit of exposing, critiquing and fighting spatial violence by reclaiming/unlocking the enormous potential of media tools.

Author Biographies

Aleksandar Stanicic, Delft University of Technology

Aleksandar Staničić is an architect and assistant professor at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, the Chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination. Previously he was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at TU Delft, research scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University, and postdoctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture at MIT. He is currently working on two book projects, War Diaries: Design after the Destruction of Art and Architecture (co-editor, University of Virginia Press, 2021) and Transition Urbicide: Post-War Reconstruction in Post-Socialist Belgrade (sole author, forthcoming). He is recipient of grants and fellowships from the Graham Foundation, the European Commission, the Government of Lombardy Region, Italy, and the Ministry of Education, Republic of Serbia.

Marc Schoonderbeek, Delft University of Technology

Marc Schoonderbeek is an architect and the programme director of Borders & Territories. He currently acts as research nestor for the Department of Architecture at TU Delft. His doctorate, ‘Place-Time Discontinuities: Mapping in Architectural Discourse’, presented a theory of mapping in architectural discourse by making explicit the relationship between spatial analysis and architectural design.  In 1998, he co-founded 12PM-Architecture: Office for Architecture and Urbanism, Design and Research in Amsterdam. He is the series editor of the Architectural Borders and Territories book series with Routledge (starting in 2020), and an editor of Footprint and the Modi Operandi series. He lectured at numerous architecture institutes, and has contributed to architectural magazines. In 2004, he co-founded 66EAST: Centre for Urban Culture in Amsterdam and has published Houses in Transformation: Interventions in European Gentrification (2008; with JaapJan Berg, Tahl Kaminer and Joost Zonneveld); Border Conditions (2010) and X Agendas for Architecture (2015, with Oscar Rommens and Loed Stolte).

Heidi Sohn, Delft University of Technology

Heidi Sohn is associate professor of Architecture Theory, academic coordinator and interim chair of Architecture Theory at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft. She received her PhD in Architecture Theory from TU Delft in 2006. She is co-editor of Clinical and Critical Cartographies (with Andrej Radman, EUP, 2017) and author of multiple publications. She is a founding editor of Footprint (2007–2012). She was visiting professor of Architectural Theory at DIA in Dessau, Germany, and at Umeå School of Architecture in Sweden. Her main areas of investigation include genealogical inquiries of postmodern and post-human theoretical landscapes, as well as diverse geopolitical and politico-economic expressions of late capitalist urbanisation.

Armina Pilav, University of Sheffield

Armina Pilav is feminist, architect, curator, researcher and lecturer at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield. She received the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for her Un-war Space research (2016–2018) developed at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, TU Delft. Her research, practice and teaching intersects and focuses on politics of re-presentation and re-production of physical, mediated space, bodily and interspecies experiences in extreme conditions of the war destruction. She founded Un-war Space Lab, the collective of architects and intermedia artists researching and exposing, spatially and virtually, ecologies of violent spatial transformations.

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Published

2021-02-23

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 2 (2020): Issue # 27 | Autumn / Winter 2020 | Conflict Mediations

Section

Editorial

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Aleksandar Stanicic, Marc Schoonderbeek, Heidi Sohn, Armina Pilav

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