Space and Democracy - the Un-Built, Athens 2008

While searching for something concerning my project, I found a site that is called "The space of democracy - The democracy of space".There was a conference from this network in Greece the previous year. I will post a text here and the link of this conference in the end, so whoever wants can be directed at the site. It has some videos, but the majority of them is in Greek (sorry for this!)

UN-BUILT - 2008 international architecture research events

www.byzantinemuseum.gr/unbuilt/unbuilt.htm

The Athens Byzantine and Christian Museum

in collaboration with SARCHA (School of ARCHitecture for All)

organize the international conference

Negotiating the Un-built

Interdisciplinary Interactions on Space and Democracy

an Athens event of the Space of Democracy and the Democracy of Space network supported by the

ESRC (Economic and Society Research Council) UK

Athens, December 19-20, 2008

During the last decade of the 20th century the concept of space/place has entered several debates in the humanities and social sciences in what has been summarized as ‘the spatial turn’. For other disciplines, such as architecture, space has been a central operative tool since the 19th century. Practitioners and theorists have approached it in a variety of ways in different periods of history, and it still remains today a valid concept with a constantly changing content. Within the general context of the spatial turn, this event aims at highlighting the problematic of the un-built in both its dimensions, as a limit to be negotiated and even marked and acknowledged as well as an incarnation of the promise of architectural/political imagination and socio-spatial construction. The dialectic and/or disjunction between these two angles seem to stand at the centre of any attempt to discuss the relation between space and democracy.

The two distinct dimensions are evident both in political theory/practice and in theorisations/enactments of space and architecture. The un-built, for example, has been historically associated with unrealized projects that may be attributed to a wide range of reasons; from the ‘circumstantial’ ones related to financial or construction technology restrictions, building regulations or policy particularities, to the less apparent social, historical, political issues, and the cultural stereotypes operative in a given context. On the other hand, the un-built also denotes so-called utopian or visionary spatial/architectural projects and the operation of drawing or writing as a critical tool. The un-built is that which cannot be built or awaiting to be built as much as that which is drawn and discussed but not meant to be realised. It indicates a state of abjection and repression, designates a condition of potential conflict and, at the same time, holds the promise of transformation. The un-built is therefore more than a mere void or empty space. If we consider it as ‘an agitated state of a seemingly balanced immobility in which all possibilities remain open, and all states of attachments can be potentially enacted’, it might form a basis for thinking the contemporary relation between democracy and space. This is especially the case given the prominent theorisations of dynamics between emptiness and fullness in democratic politics (as highlighted by a series of contemporary theorists from Claude Lefort and radical democratic theory onwards), psychoanalytic theory (mostly in the Lacanian tradition), theories of space, etc. Here emptiness and lack is not an accident or anomaly that needs to be masked and covered over but a limit, a mark of contingency and finitude that needs to be ethically negotiated and politically marked. At the same time it stimulates the desire for the new. In these traditions the problematic of the un-built meets that of the unconscious, the abject, the unrepresentable, raising the issue of exclusion and its ‘administration’ in democracy and post-democracy (locally and globally). The event will assume the form of a series of interactions between theoreticians, urban theorists and architects that will theoretically address issues related to the democracy of space in historical and contemporary contexts, and activist groups/teams or initiatives that work within the conditions of the un-built to create a space for democratic exchange and mobility in the current circumstances. ‘Speakers’ and ‘groups’ will be provided with equal time (30 minutes) to develop their arguments. The conference language is English.

The conference took place as the December insurrection was unfolding in Athens.