Knierbein, S. (2024). Introduction to events and dissidence. In N. Bobic & F. Haghighi (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume II : Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities. Routledge.
This chapter introduces the concepts of dissidence and events, and their connections, to further qualify the political analysis of urban space in the field of architecture. It starts from contested architectural dialogues beyond mainstream and canonic debates, introduces urban space as a mode of political thinking and seeks to move political thinking in architecture both toward and beyond public space. As part of this move, architecture is linked back to everyday agency and urban experience. Successively, key ideas connecting how architects may think about events and dissidence are introduced, allowing for linking thought about architecture and power, transformation, connections, institutions, dialogue and courage. These may help to challenge nested and situated practice, canon and mainstream within the architectural field. This chapter emphasizes the altering and hope-filled potentialities of architecture. This proceeding is oriented by following three crucial questions: Whose representation? Whose praxis? Whose contribution? And Whose change? Ultimately enriching the scope of integrating urban experience into an understanding of architecture as spatially contextualized, discourses around dissidence range from softer forms of opposition toward radically utopian forms of unsettling the architectural canon through resistance. Simultaneously, events serve to radically revisit the conceptual relation between space, practice and architecture.
