Constituent relations across the city: Three perspectives from practice

What kinds of practices help us to explore, rethink and remake our co-relations? Constituent relations across the city: Three perspectives from practice. In this session, we propose speaking across and from three different spatial practices of which we are part,and which are situated in different socio-spatial conditions: a place of their own (an art/spatial research practice); Studio Polpo (the UK’s first social enterprise architectural practice); and Architecture Sans Frontières - UK (a non-profit aiming to make community development integral to architectural practice and teaching). By sharing moments of co-incidence from these practices that seek to co-otherwise we seek to show thinking and acting with co-ness is generative of creative, relational processes and resistant practices. Studio Polpo designs situated and collaborative approaches to create objects, structures, initiatives and research-led resources that enable transformative social change. To this end we self-initiate projects to support diverse economies of participation and exchange through spatial intervention. We have facilitated the collective ownership and/or management of a number of buildings and programmes, hosted events which protest the commercial use of city centres and propose more diverse ways of living and exchanging that activate more distributed networks of design. ASF-UK is a non-profit organisation with three main objectives: to increase knowledge and understanding of community participation amongst built environment students and practitioners (training and capacity building); to support community groups, civil society organisations and local governments by working in partnership and facilitating the involvement of built environment professionals (live projects); and to influence urban policy and planning processes by mainstreaming methodologies and practices focused on democratic and resilient city-making (advocacy). a place of their own operate as a collective, a couple, with our children, and through collaborations with others. In the Eile Project, we operate in the specific context of the geo-political border between the Irish Republic and the UK and enact an alternative ethics of spatial action through intra-actions and ‘kinning’. Eile's interventions, rituals and the audiovisual films we produce with them draw forth kinship, different alliances between organic and in-organic matter, non-human animals (the white cryptic butterfly, the lobster), and re-territorialize traumatic sites. Why this (co-) is an important question for us to carry out these kinds of practices? Or What kinds of practices help us to explore, rethink and remake our co-relations?

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