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Volume 6, Number 1/2, 2023



Architecture Philosophy is the journal of the International Society for the Philosophy 
of Architecture (ISPA). The society was founded in 2009 by Carolyn Fahey, and 
the journal was first published in 2014 by Tom Spector, Carolyn Fahey, and Stefan 
Koller. 

Architecture Philosophy proudly acknowledges the financial support from the 
Oklahoma State University School of Architecture and the College of Engineering 
Architecture and Technology that makes free distribution of print copies possible. The 
journal also acknowledges the support from the Oklahoma State University Library 
for making the submission management software, the journal’s online presence, and 
its indexing in academic search engines a reality. 

Architecture Philosophy (ISSN 2372-0883) is published semiannually. Two parts form 
a volume. The subscription is free for digital copies, and print copies are available to 
society members. Visit isparchitecture.com for digital access to the journal’s content

Graphic design:  Carolyn Fahey
Lay-out: Hans Teerds 

Copying
This journal is copyrighted by Oklahoma State University. For permission requests 
please contact the ISPA at isparchitecture@gmail.com.

© Oklahoma State University

Printed in the United States by Oklahoma State University.



Managing Editor
Tom Spector, Ph.D., University of California - Berkeley

Editors of this Issue
André Patrão, Ph.D., Yale University
Hans Teerds, Ph.D., ETH Zurich
Christoph Baumberger, Ph.D., ETH Zurich

Editorial Board
Philosophy
Rebecca Bensen-Cain, Ph.D., University of California - Santa Barbara
Rafael de Clercq, Ph.D., Catholic University Leuven 
Noël Carroll, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago
Paul Guyer, Ph.D., Harvard University
Christian Illies, Ph.D., University of Oxford
Jeff Malpas, Ph.D., Australian National University

Architecture
Andrew Ballantyne, Ph.D., University of Sheffield
Ufuk Ersoy, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Helen Mallinson, Ph.D., London Consortium
David Leatherbarrow, Ph.D., University of Essex
Graham Owen, M.Des., Harvard University
Nicholas Ray, M.A., University of Cambridge
David Leatherbarrow, Ph.D., University of Essex 
Graham Owen, M.Des., Harvard University
Nicholas Ray, M.A., University of Cambridge

Contact
Web  isparchitecture.com
EMail  isparchitecture@gmail.com
         tom.spector@okstate.edu



CONTENTS

Public Space. The Real and the Ideal. 
Editorial

Public Space. Conflicts and Antinomies

On the Political, Public Space and the 
Possibility of a Critical Architecture

The Space of Appearance within the 
Megalopolis. Architectural Culture-
Politics of São Paulo 1957-2017

A Site of Struggle. An Interview with 
Margaret Crawford

Architectural Responsibilities and the 
Right to a City

Property, Necessity and Housing. 
Reconsidering the Situated Right 
to a Place to Be

Anonymity in Jianghu. Hong Kong’s 
Urban Space in Times of Crisis

Parametric Design in the Historic Urban 
Domain. The Case of Eleftheria Square 
by Zaha Hadid Architects 

What Architecture Does. An Embodied 
Approach Towards the Impact of the 
Built Environment

On Foot. Embodied Atmospheres

André Patrão, Hans Teerds, 
Christoph Baumberger 
& Tom Spector

Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Chantal Mouffe

Kenneth Frampton

Hans Teerds

Saul Fisher

Erika Brandl

Esther Lorenz

Stella Evangelidou

Margit van Schaik

Andreea Mihalache

5

13

27

39

51

63

83

101

117

139

165



AMSTERDAM (2018)



While the importance of public space seems 
mostly undisputed, much disagreement continues 
to emerge concerning its purposes, its boundaries, 
its characteristics, its use, and most importantly the 
extent of the threats it faces. 

Different visions of public space have taken 
form in the works of such diverse architectural 
and urban practitioners, historians and critics, as 
Camillo Sitte, Kenneth Frampton, Rem Koolhaas, 
Michael Sorkin, Margaret Crawford, and Jan Gehl, 
but also of urban sociologists like Setha Low and 
Lyn Lofland, activists such as Jane Jacobs and Mike 
Davis, as well as such influential philosophers and 
political theorists as Henri Lefebvre, Hannah Arendt, 
Jürgen Habermas, and Chantal Mouffe. Many of 
them have read public space from a humanistic, 
pluralistic, democratic perspective, offering various 
descriptions of what it might mean in the broader 
context of a democratic society’s organization. And 
while their ideals of social interaction and political 
debate do not necessarily constrain the definition 
of a public space to a physical location, historically 
these values frequently find tangible expression in 
the Greek agora, the coffee shop, the city square, 
the town hall, the parliament, and especially the 
street. The built environment therefore offers more 
than just functional areas or aesthetic experiences. 
It is a force that shapes a world-in-common, groun-
ded on encounter and appearance, discussion and 
mediation, with all the tension and conflict that 
implies.

Today, this ideal of public space must address 
new challenges and renewed versions of the old, 
from recent developments in cities and societies 

Public Space. The real and the ideal. 
Editorial

André PatrÃo, Hans Teerds, 
Christoph Baumberger, and Tom Spector



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such as smart-cities, Big Data, and gentrification, to such well-established 
problems as segregation, commodification, and surveillance. The recent 
history of public spaces finds them increasingly privatized, controlled, 
monitored, and scripted. They are designed to accommodate leisure and 
tourism, shopping and sporting, transportation and traveling, often with 
little regard for the social and political ideal of encounter and exchange, 
thereby neglecting to make room for the struggles and disputes inherent to 
it. But, it has turned out, that even in highly controlled spaces social and 
political life can occur, as shown for example in the 2022 protests in Iran, 
where despite the risk of arrest and even death, people take to the streets 
to protest against the restrictions to women’s participation in public life. 
This state of affairs presses the questions: How important is architecture 
and urban design for public life after all? Does design still draw concrete 
outlines for public life and its socio-political dimensions, or can these be 
catered for elsewhere? And how does philosophy help elucidate and tackle 
these problems?

These and many other topics concerning public space were discussed at 
the 5th Biennial Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy 
of Architecture, organized by ETH Zürich and the EPFL. After a one-
year postponement due to the outbreak of a pandemic and the public 
health restrictions that ensued – and added another topic of concern to the 
agenda – the conference met in 2021 at Monte Verità, a former utopian-
like hub of alternative cooperative life in the Swiss canton of Ticino, 
standing in the beautiful landscape between the Alps and Lago Maggiore. 
What followed were four days of lively, varied, intense exchanges between 
more than eighty speakers, including philosophers, architectural theorists, 
architects, urban planners, urban designers, landscape architects, and 
scholars of many other fields. Ten contributions, including all four keynote 
lectures, have been published in this special double issue of Architecture 
Philosophy.

To prepare the ground for such a sprawling topic, the first article briefly 
surveys pivotal moments in the history of public space and the ways it 
has been read, touching upon several of its key themes and recurring 
philosophical figures. Sven-Olov Wallenstein’s ‘Public Space: Conflicts 
and Antinomies’ moves from the fabricated idea of an ideal Greek polis to 
Kant’s constitution of one in the spirit of the Enlightenment, a foundational 
moment for the modern notion of a public political space. The accounts 
that followed, until this day, have often stressed the rise and looming fall 
of public space, perceived as perpetually and increasingly under threat. 
However, public space has also been described as inherently conflictual, 
not anomalously (divergences to be reconciled) but constitutively (the 



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clashes of those divergences are what characterizes 
public space). These versions do not converge, nor 
does one exclude the other. As Wallenstein states, 
they “[…] can neither be fused into a common 
story, nor can we simply choose between them; 
perhaps they can be said to constitute something 
like the antinomy of public space.”1 

A leading proponent of the conflictual view is 
Chantal Mouffe, who made her case in the lecture 
published here under the title ‘On the Political: 
Public Space and the Possibility of a Critical 
Architecture.” Liberal philosophical discourses, 
Mouffe claims, react to the antagonist dimension 
of the political as a problem to be resolved, either 
through a rational compromise between different 
interests or a consensus grounded on free discussion. 
However, “[…] despite what many liberals want 
us to believe, the specificity of democratic politics 
is not to overcome this ‘we/them’ opposition, but 
how to construct this opposition, compatible with 
the recognition of pluralism.”2 Mouffe proposes 
agonism as an alternative, one which embraces the 
existence of conflicting interests not by regarding 
the other as an enemy, as in an antagonistic relation, 
but as a legitimate adversary. Public spaces, therefore, 
function at their best not as places of accord but of 
dispute. The construction or challenge to hegemonic 
political identities also unfolds outside of political 
institutions, importantly through artistic practices 
– in which Mouffe includes architecture.

How do these philosophical ideas play out in the 
built environment? In ‘The Space of Appearance 
within the Megalopolis: Architectural Culture-
Politics of São Paulo 1957-2017’, Kenneth Frampton 
calls attention to the contemporary challenges 
that arise for public spaces – in their political and 
constructive senses – with the recent transformation 
of the polis into the megalopolis. In São Paulo, 
the most populated city in Brasil and one of the 
biggest in the world, he discovers numerous works 
that open a space of appearance in the Arendtian 

      THE BUILT 
ENVIRONMENT 
OFFERS MORE 

THAN JUST 
FUNCTIONAL AREAS 

OR AESTHETIC 
EXPERIENCES. 

IT IS A FORCE THAT 
SHAPES A WORLD-

IN-COMMON.

“

”



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sense, such as the SESC Pompeia by Lina Bo Bardi and Marcelo Ferraz, 
the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo by 
João Vilanova Artigas, and the SESC 2017 by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. 
In these examples, Frampton says, one can admire a distinctive Paulista-
school “[...] accommodation of socio-cultural and politically progressive 
programs within the fabric of tectonically articulated, monumental form.”3 

Many different agents participate in the design and use of public urban 
spaces besides – though by no means excluding – architects and urbanists. 
Hans Teerds’ interview with Margaret Crawford, ‘A Site of Struggle,’ 
explores more contemporary case-studies in the United States, particularly 
in California. The shopping mall, once the target of Crawford’s ineludible 
critiques on the privatization of public space, reappears in a more favorable 
light. As she points out, “[…] many people now go to malls more for public 
interaction rather than to actually buy something. Physical shopping can be 
understood as a positive force shaping public space, as compared to online 
shopping from home.”4 Crawford also commented on recent examples 
where the use of public spaces turned contentious – antagonistic, even 
– involving, for example, migrant workers waiting for a ride in front of 
private stores, street-vendors in Los Angeles, barbecuers at a public park in 
Oakland, and the Black Lives Matter movement, which Crawford labels as 
“[…] the most important public space development in the last 10 years.”5 
Each of these particular instances illustrates and reasserts the recurring idea 
throughout all the keynote speakers of public space as a place of struggle.

An influential claim from within this struggle issued decades ago by 
Henri Lefebvre – another well-known author in the discussion of public 
space – was a focal point of Saul Fisher’s ‘Architectural Responsibilities and 
the Right to a City.’ He revisits Lefebvre’s notion of “the right to the city” 
so as to renderer it “feasible, generic, and so broadly amenable to many 
of its adherents,” while illustrating the effects of its denial through several 
hypothetical scenarios of contemporary life.6 Fisher’s crucial question 
goes even further though: if we are to accept such a right, then what 
responsibilities does it entail for architects?

The question may also be asked of the right to refuge from public space. 
Erika Brandl speaks of adequate housing as a basic need in ‘Property, 
Necessity, and Housing: Reconsidering the Situated Right to a Place to 
Be.’ She stresses that the question “‘Why must something be done inside 
and not outside the house?’ is another way of asking ‘Why are dwellings so 
necessary to us?’”7 Through the works of Jeremy Waldron, Richard Epstein, 
and Alejandra Mancilla, Brandl demonstrates how political philosophy 
not only sheds light on architectural problems of domesticity, but also on 
what architectural practice can do to address them.



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Beyond the framework of a dichotomy between 
the private and the public lays the Chinese notion 
of jianghu, as explained by Esther Lorenz in 
‘Anonymity in Jianghu: Hong Kong’s Urban Space in 
Times of Crisis.’ Jianghu has come to define a realm 
deliberately apart from societal and political order. 
Lorenz uses this word, which literally translates 
into “rivers and lakes,” to better understand a 
description of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, a 
movement inspired by the Bruce Lee quote “be 
like water.” Through uncontrollable anonymous 
digital means, protesters coalesced like flash-floods 
to turn unexpected places like roads and roofs into 
ephemeral political public spaces. According to 
Lorenz, “[w]hat we witnessed in 2019 in Hong 
Kong was the emergence of a contemporary form of 
jianghu, as a hybridization of digital space, material 
space, and spatial practices.”8

Conversely, even the most stereotypical typology 
of public space does not guarantee a site for social and 
political aggregation. Stella Evangelidou analyzes the 
design strategy behind an intervention on southern 
Nicosia’s main square, in ‘Parametric Design in the 
Historic Urban Domain: The Case of Eleftheria 
Square by Zaha Hadid Architects.’ Parametricism, 
she argues, operated not simply as a design tool 
but as an architectural ideology; polemical from 
the project’s conception and selection to its use 
after construction. As Evangelidou sees it, “[t]he 
hyper-aestheticized and non-functional forms have 
displaced political actions from the site. Eleftheria 
Square has lost its quality as a topos politikos.”9

The powerful potential of architecture, whether 
positive or negative, intended or not, upon the 
social and political dimensions of public space is 
at the center of Margit van Schaik’s study of its 
most symbolic sites. ‘What Architecture Does – 
An Embodied Approach towards the Impact of the 
Built Environment’ considers how the architectural 
properties of the Dutch Parliament Building affect 
the manner in which politics is conducted in the 

     The BLACK 
LIVES MATTER 

MOVEMENT IS THE 
MOST IMPORTANT 

PUBLIC SPACE 
DEVELOPMENT 

IN THE LAST 
10 YEARS.

“

”



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country, but keeps some distance from deterministic claims. As she says, 
“[…] a window does not determine you look through it, but it does 
influence what you will see if you do.”10 Van Schaik grounds her outlook 
on input from philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience, brought 
together in the theories of embodiment advanced by Francisco Varela and 
Evan Thomson.

A different approach to one’s embodied experience of place adopts 
Bernard Rudolsky’s sandals as a medium. ‘On Foot: Embodied 
Atmospheres,’ by Andreea Mihalache, suggests that “[m]ore than footwear, 
the sandals are a design manifesto expressing the connection between 
feet and floors, always in touch through the intimacy of the sole […].”11  
Against the long-standing dominant formal and sight-centered attitudes 
in both philosophy and architecture, Mihalache urges for the embrace 
of subjective experience of atmospheres as a design criteria, which has 
precedent in the two disciplines’ history nonetheless. Roaming around 
houses, strolling down streets, the tactile experience of walking partakes in 
the finding of one’s ground – literally and figuratively.

All ten contributions offer deeply informative, intellectually stimulating, 
thought-provoking insights. They tackle plenty of topics, engaged from 
diverse research frameworks, and look at distinct case-studies from 
multiple times and places, to reach a variety of significant claims which 
may overlap or conflict, but all contribute to an understanding of the 
real and ideal characteristics of public space. These results emerge from 
a historically productive dialogue between two disciplines while thinking 
together. That long and fruitful tradition continues in this special issue of 
Architecture Philosophy.

Endnotes
1. Sven-Olov Wallenstein, ‘Public Space. Conflicts and Antinomies’, in: 

Architecture Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 (2023), 13.
2. Chantal Mouffe, ‘On the Political, Public Space and the Possibility of a 

Critical Architecture’, in: Architecture Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 (2023), 
29. 

3. Kenneth Frampton, ‘The Space of Appearance within the Megalopolis. 
Architectural Culture-Politics of São Paulo 1957-2017’, in: Architecture 
Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 (2023), 45.

4. Hans Teerds, ‘A Site of Struggle. An Interview with Margaret Crawford,’ 
in: Architecture Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 (2023), 51-52. 

5. Ibid., 58.
6. Saul Fisher, ‘Architectural Responsibilities and the Right to a City’, in: 

Architecture Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 (2023), 63.



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7. Erika Brandl, ‘Property, Necessity and Housing. 
Reconsidering the Situated Right to a Place to 
Be’, in: Architecture Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 
(2023), 85.

8. Esther Lorenz, ‘Anonymity in Jianghu. Hong 
Kong’s Urban Space in Times of Crisis’. in: 
Architecture Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 (2023), 
113.

9. Stella Evangelidou, ‘Parametric Design in the 
Historic Urban Domain. The Case of Eleftheria 
Square by Zaha Hadid Architects’, in: Architecture 
Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 (2023), 135.

10. Margit van Schaik, ‘What Architecture Does. 
An Embodied Approach Towards the Impact 
of the Built Environment’, in: Architecture 
Philosophy, Vol 6, no.1/2 (2023), 149.

11. Andreea Mihalache, ‘On Foot. Embodied At-
mospheres’, in: Architecture Philosophy, Vol 6, 
no.1/2 (2023), 165.



ZURICH (2022)



The idea of public space is crucial for our political 
imagination, precisely because it is perceived as 
being not only threatened, but even as on the way 
toward extinction. Throughout its history, the 
concept seems to imply both a promise of a more 
transparent social world, and a threat to which we 
are exposed: it is a space of free exchange, but also 
one to which we are subjected, and where conflict 
seems unending. 

In this sense, two competing versions could be 
given: the first one would tell a story of the rise 
and fall of public space, and it is probably the most 
common one; the second, which is less frequent, 
presents public space as always and structurally 
constituted by a conflict that will make it into a 
space of struggle, where the dreams of undistorted 
communication not only cover over the reality 
of power, but in fact are instrumental for its 
deployment. These two can neither be fused into a 
common story, nor can we simply choose between 
them; perhaps they can be said to constitute 
something like the antinomy of public space.

Kant and the Enlightenment
The classical origin of most stories of public space 

is the agora in the Greek polis, which has taken 
on a symbolic value for all subsequent theorizing, 
notwithstanding the fact that it must be seen as a 
retroactive fantasy, similarly to many other such 
Greek “origins” that have been assumed since the 
late eighteenth century onwards. That the selection 
of citizens that were allowed to take part in Greek 
democracy was indeed small has been brushed 
aside, which has made it possible to transform it 

Public space. Conflicts and Antinomies

Sven-Olov Wallenstein



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into a model for various promises of a restored Gemeinschaft in modernity, 
a community that would rest on a direct “representation,” as if the 
exclusionary mechanisms at once had been repressed and sublimated into 
a kind of ideal space. This trope appears in Winckelmann, Rousseau, the 
early Romantics, the young Hegel (who would later discard it), and many 
other thinkers on the eighteenth century that were trying to articulate a 
new foundation for political theory after the downfall of the absolutist-
theological model. (In fact, even though this is rarely made into an explicit 
theme, the various versions of contract theory seem to require something 
like a common space, a medium of assembly, in which the first act of 
signing occurs, since it takes place at one singular point in time, not as a 
series of individual events separated in space and time.)

The second step in this story is the construction of an ideal public 
space, which as we noted often looks back to its alleged Greek origin, 
and yet constitutes something basically new. This is the idea of a world 
of rational reflection, communication, and judgment that would rely on 
readers dispersed in space and time, only related through the sense that 
they share a common rational project. We find this outlined in Kant,1 in 
his conception of the Enlightenment and its Öffentlichkeit as a spatial and 
temporal ideal form where all dogmas, theoretical as well as moral and 
political, can be subjected to debate. To participate in this debate, Kant 
proposes, one must however act as a “public” person and not as a bearer of 
official authority, as in the case of the judge, the magistrate, the priest, etc., 
which in Kant’s vocabulary are “private” uses of reason (for us today, this 
terminology would be inverted). The divide between these two roles comes 
across in a statement that has spawned many vitriolic remarks, and it seems 
to make Kant into a late-come proponent of the traditional doctrine of 
Reason of State, or even a kind of Prussian state philosopher: “Reason 
as much as you wish but obey!” What Kant in fact means, however, is  
something different that still today remains a basic tenet of legal theory. 
Whoever acts as a figure of public authority must uphold what Kant in 
other contexts calls the “mechanism of society,” since processes based on 
authority must be transparent and predictable once the initial variables 
are clearly staked out. We may indeed reason as much as we want, and 
question the soundness of laws. but this reasoning belongs to a space of 
individual, intellectual license, which as such is not the basis of procedures 
of authority. When passing a judgment, the court must follow the law, 
even though each of its members may very well perceive the law as unjust.

While the private use of reason is based on authority and obedience, 
Kant stresses the processual character of the public debate, which means 
that it should remain open-ended. We are living in an age of enlightenment, 



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he writes, not an enlightened age, since the latter 
would assume that reason had been perfected. If 
the process were to be stopped, i.e., if we would 
attain a perfect “match” between thinking and 
world, such a state could in a sense not be separated 
from a metaphysical dogmatism where truth 
could be decreed, and reasoning comes to an end. 
Enlightenment is reflexive, in the sense that it must 
always be prepared to question its own results.

As Kant notes, this is due to a “maturing 
capacity for judgment” characteristic of that 
period which allows for the step out of our “self-
incurred tutelage” (Unmündigkeit), as he writes in 
the Enlightenment essay which also makes it all 
the more essential for everyone of us to attempt to 
“think in the place of everyone else,” as he later will 
say in the Critique of Judgment (§ 40).2 What Kant 
in fact discovers, as he moves from the first to the 
third Critique and the various essays on politics, is 
that judgment is not simply “determining,” as in 
theoretical cognition, but also “reflexive,” engaging 
a dimension of intersubjectivity that requires us to 
change perspective, and to project a possible future 
where we all would be spontaneously reconciled, 
while still acknowledging that no empirical state 
of affairs could ever be said to be precisely such a 
fulfilled state. 

In the third Critique, the discussion of judgment 
is carried out in terms of taste, beauty, and the 
sublime, and the link to the political writings does 
not at first hand seem obvious, although a closer 
reading of the texts reveals many subterranean links. 
They are however always tentative, as if experiments 
in thought that transfer propositional forms by 
way of analogy, metaphor, metonymy, and a host 
of other figures. Rather than an aestheticizing of 
politics, or a politicizing of aesthetics, the twofold 
temptation that haunts post-Kantian modernity, 
it is an exercise in what Kant in the third Critique 
calls an “enlarged mode of thought” (erweitere 
Denkungsart), a reflection that does not aim for 



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grounding in theory of practice, but moves freely between them, drawing 
on all types of sources and texts, unfolding in the interstices of imagination 
and judgment. 

For instance, when Kant refers to the French revolution, he introduces 
the idea of a “sign of history” that would account for the way in which 
empirical events impact not only the affective part of the spectator, but 
also introduces ideas of reason, and even constitutes a kind of historical 
teleology, although surrounded by several caveats. The sign introduces a 
certain temporal dimension, and, as we will see, it at least communicates 
indirectly with the idea of a public space that would be materialized and 
embodied in a kind of monumentality. The relevant passages can be found 
in the second part of Kant’s The Conflict of Faculties,3 where the question is 
whether progress in history can be ascertained or not. No direct empirical 
facts will suffice, Kant claims, instead we should attempt to find “signs” 
that indicate—indirectly, precisely as signs—the existence of a transformed 
moral disposition. The French revolution, he suggests, is such a case, not 
because it has brought about shifts and changes in government (these 
may be reversed, and even lead to a factually worse state than before), but 
because it affects the spectators in a particular fashion. It is not the violence, 
the sound and fury of the res gestae that signify moral improvement; in 
fact, at the end of the day, the effects of the revolution may be such that it 
actually increases the amount of suffering in the world. The crucial aspect 
is what Kant calls enthusiasm,4 a particular passion among those who 
experience it from a certain distance, in this case from across the Rhine: 
it is the Germans who are filled with enthusiasm, and a whole generation 
of idealist philosophers and poets in the wake of Kant will corroborate 
his analysis. The Germans, Kant argues, are precisely by virtue of their 
distance from the stage of history exempt from the violence of pathological 
passions, since they have nothing to gain by entertaining them; on the 
contrary, their passions will be redirected from immediate aims towards 
moral principles, and in this they indicate a particular receptivity for ideas 
that is lost in the immediate imbroglio of the French milieu. 

First, we must note the theatrical dimension. The drama is organized 
by the divide between stage and audience, perhaps to some extent drawing 
on an implicit reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, where enthusiasm replaces 
katharsis as the desired outcome. But the revolution is as such obviously 
not a fiction, rather a real event whose moral effect can only be discerned 
if it passes through a certain distancing and aesthetic derealization. The 
impact of the political is registered in a quasi-aesthetic space, and even 
though the real (events and actions) cannot be reduced to an aesthetic 
phenomenon, the relation to moral principles can only be created by way 



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of a certain circulation within an aesthetic realm. 
The entangled nature of these relations no doubt 
signals a hesitance on Kant’s part, but, arguably, just 
as much the contradictory and entangled nature of 
the real itself. 

To this we must add the temporal nature of 
the historical sign: it is a signum rememorativum, 
demonstrativum et prognosticon, i.e. a sign of memory 
that tells us that there has always been a certain 
amount of progress, a sign that demonstrates that 
there is a case in the present, and a sign that offers 
the prognosis that there will be progress in the future, 
that hope is not lost regardless of the vicissitudes of 
the revolution at present. In this sense, it institutes a 
historical possibility: even though empirical events 
may lead us astray and even turn out disastrously, 
this possibility cannot sink into complete oblivion. 
The same holds for the Enlightenment, which for 
Kant, as we saw, is not simply an empirical phase in 
history, but a reflexive move within reason itself, in 
which it calls upon itself to know itself, from within, 
without any support from transcendent authorities. 

The sign can in this sense be understood within 
a logic of the monument: it preserves a moment 
in time, embodies an idea, and projects it into 
the future. Orienting the affective response of the 
beholder towards the domain of moral principles 
and supersensible ideas, it points to a possibility 
to be realized in the future. But it also points to 
the transcendence of such a future in relation to all 
empirical presents; the aesthetic affect must remain 
in an imaginary realm, if it is to retain its force in the 
realm of political, whereas any collapse of the two 
into each other would be precisely a “transcendental 
illusion” in the sense Kant had already outlined in 
the first Critique.

The sign of history is only one of the many 
intermediary figures that Kant proposes to create a 
bridge between the sensible and the supersensible, 
nature and freedom, and it is no easy task to sort 
them in a clear order, or to see if they are connected, 

      IF THE “CRITIQUE 
OF POLITICAL 

REASON” REMAINED 
IN A STATE OF 

FRAGMENTATION 
AND SUSPENSION, 

IT WAS BECAUSE 
THE POLITICAL FOR 

KANT COULDN’T 
BE SUBSUMED 

UNDER A PRIORI 
PRINCIPLES.

“

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hierarchically or otherwise. As Lyotard points out (and in this he often 
comes close to Arendt),5 if the “critique of political reason” remained in 
a state of fragmentation and suspension, it was because the political for 
Kant couldn’t be subsumed under a priori principles, but always mobilized      
concepts drawn from cognition, ethics, and aesthetics, even religion, in a 
way that blurs the line between proper and improper uses. 

The Rise and Fall of Public Space
In the tradition from Kant, this lack of a priori principles has often been 

taken as a positive characteristic: it is the absence of univocal rules that 
constitutes the idea of society as a kind of ongoing mediation and reflection, 
an open-ended process of legitimization and production of consensus that 
neither acknowledges the decrees issued by a sovereign power, nor those of 
any alleged science of politics. Thus, many have claimed that the creation 
of a modern political space would have Kantian Criticism and the French 
Revolution as  two founding moments. As Claude Lefort puts it, the end 
of the eighteenth century would have been the moment of the “democratic 
invention” or the “invention of democracy,”6 which as such was marked 
by a constitutive ambivalence:  the subject that speaks (the “people”) is 
at the same time to be brought forth in this very same address, via a kind 
of political performativity. But rather than simply a contradiction that 
in advance would undermine this new political logic, the performative is 
what dismantles the theological and/or ontological foundation of politics, 
to the effect that we can say that there is politics, in the modern sense of 
the term, precisely to the extent that the very idea of a foundation has 
eroded. There is an absence at the heart of society, a void that many are 
indeed eager and even desperate to fill, which is why a certain totalitarian 
temptation always follows modern democracy like a shadow (for instance, 
as we noted earlier, by letting the aesthetic fill out this gap, not just as a 
“bridge,” as Kant writes, but as a common positive ground).

A somewhat different narrative is provided by Jürgen Habermas, from 
his early analysis of the public sphere to the later theories of communicative 
action.7 For him, the idea of a constitutive void or indeterminacy is not 
enough to safeguard a modern idea of the political; instead, he suggests 
that the theory of communication must be given a “transcendental” status 
if the respective roles of discourse are to be safeguarded. Despite these 
differences, Lefort’s and Habermas’s theories both delineate powerful 
and highly influential narratives of the emergence of political freedom as 
connected to the space of public life, and for both the Kantian moment 
occupies a central place. 



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It is however also crucial that in both accounts 
(more emphatically in Habermas), the public sphere 
is perceived as under threat. When Habermas in his 
classic 1962 study on the transformations of the 
public sphere begins by locating the promise of a 
public sphere, he points to the time of Kant and the 
emergence of what could be called modern media 
as a site of free reflection (they create a “world of 
readers,” eine Leserwelt, as Kant says). But at the 
same time, this account seems already from the 
outset destined to end with the corruption of this 
very same system, at a point where it is absorbed 
by commercial interests and becomes part of a 
culture of the spectacle. One can ask to what extent 
the public sphere that Habermas’s whole discourse 
mourns for ever existed; if it was there as a promise 
at the end of the Enlightenment, as an idea (but 
nothing more) in Kant, then as soon as its real and 
material infrastructure was set in place, it began to 
deteriorate. 

It seems clear that the idea of a single public space 
governed by the rules of rational communication 
was never, or will ever be, instantiated empirically, 
and in this sense it can only be taken as a 
“regulative” idea in the Kantian sense: it is there in 
order to make sense of, or more precisely to judge 
and evaluate, a given empirical manifold, but it 
is never instantiated as such, which is probably 
why Habermas in his later writings comes to 
understand the ideal communicative situation 
as a transcendental requirement (or in terms of a 
“transcendental pragmatics,” as proposed by Karl-
Otto Apel).8 The problem with this however is 
whether such a regulative idea is at all capable of 
accounting for a factual development: it achieves its 
authority by adopting a normative transcendence 
with respect to the vicissitudes of history, while it 
remains unclear to what extent any of these factual 
developments were ever directed by this ideal. 
Similarly, one could ask if the ideal of a transparent 
communication could ever account for what goes 

       IT SEEMS 
CLEAR THAT 

THE IDEA OF A 
SINGLE PUBLIC 

SPACE GOVERNED 
BY THE RULES 

OF RATIONAL 
COMMUNICATION 
WAS NEVER, OR 

WILL EVER BE, 
INSTANTIATED 
EMPIRICALLY.

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on in communication; simply reiterating the traditional divide between is 
and ought may seem like evading the question, or at least to remain deaf to 
what goes on in language. The later claims by Habermas that the problems 
could be settled through a “procedural rationality” (a minimum set of rules 
that safeguard rationality without making any substantial claims about 
the content of debates) seems to go in the same direction, and appears to 
assume that the basic questions have already been solved, or at least could 
be bracketed because of their technical, specialized nature.9      

Drawing on Habermasian ideas, but in a way that stays closer to 
concrete problems of public space, the urban theorist Michael Sorkin has 
suggested an analogous account of the privatization of public space, which 
ends on an even more apocalyptic note and predicts the “end of public 
space”.10 Many other similar cases could be cited;  a conclusion would 
be that it seems almost unavoidable to inscribe the idea of a public “site” 
(whose spatial characteristics may vary) for rational political discourse in 
a story that tells of rise and decline. If such a site once existed—be it the 
Greek agora, the Renaissance city, the ideal space of the Enlightenment—it 
is now a memory, an object of nostalgia. At the same time, this narrative 
cannot simply ascribe the demise of its object to some external cause: the 
rise of an affluent class that only looks to its own interests, the commercial 
press, the proliferation of information, technological changes; all of these 
are both what made this site, space, or sphere possible, and that which lies 
behind its inevitable deterioration in the present.

Genealogies of Public Space
Other narratives than those of rise and fall are obviously possible, not 

just in the sense that they would cite other empirical cases, but also, and 
more profoundly, in that they would question its underlying assumptions. 
In some cases, they could amount to what looks like an inversion of the 
first story. So in the case of Richard Sennett, whose The Fall of Public 
Man attempts to show how the nineteenth century, with its emphasis 
on personal authenticity and psychological truthfulness, displaced 
an Enlightenment culture of conversation and of the salon.11 In the 
eighteenth century “public man” was at liberty to stage a self, in a kind of 
enactment of the self in terms of rhetoric rather than psychology, whereas 
the nineteenth century would instead demand that one should appear as 
one truly is and condemn the split between inside and outside as a sign of 
moral inaptitude.12  

Other stories take us beyond the figure of reversal, and instead opt for a 
different and more conflict-ridden understanding of the historical process, 
tending to something that, following Nietzsche and Foucault, could be 



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called a “genealogical” model.13  In these stories, it 
makes no sense to ask if public space in the “true” 
sense existed at one point of another, if it was once 
a promise that was later betrayed for some reason, 
or if there has been a fall from one state to another. 
Public space has always been both an object of 
dispute, and a disputed space of the dispute itself, 
to the effect that it has no true or ideal sense beyond 
all the ways in which it has been appropriated, 
rejected, contested, and redefined. If such a space 
has a constant feature—this time not in the sense 
of a regulative idea but rather that of a pervasive 
empirical fact—it is that it has always been based on 
various exclusions and hidden or explicit privileges, 
as any analysis of the actual composition of the 
alleged origins in the Greek political assemblies and 
the agora will unambiguously show.     

 As Rosalyn Deutsche suggests, the kind of 
analysis that we have previously discussed, which 
mourns the downfall of an ideal public domain, 
might even, somewhat provocatively, be called 
“agoraphobia.”14 What it profoundly fears, she 
argues, is to acknowledge that all public discourse is 
marked by asymmetries and power relations, not just 
incidentally and contingently, but structurally and 
constitutively. Non-violent discourse might in this 
sense fulfill a very traditional definition of ideology: 
an imaginary solution to real contradictions, 
transposed to the realm of regulative ideas that 
always ought to be realized, but in fact never are 
(similarly to way in which the idea that all humans 
are equal in principle can serve to obscure that fact 
that they are never equal in reality). Such an ideal 
will always appear as distant in time or space, always 
lost or to come, and this temporal projection is what 
holds fear at bay by rationalizing it. 

In a similar vein, Chantal Mouffe claims that 
“the political,” which for her must be distinguished 
from “politics” in the empirical sense of processes of 
policy-making and decision-making, has to do with 
the way in which a society is symbolically instituted 

      IT SEEMS 
ALMOST 

UNAVOIDABLE 
TO INSCRIBE 

THE IDEA OF A 
PUBLIC “SITE” 

FOR RATIONAL 
POLITICAL 

DISCOURSE IN A 
STORY 

THAT TELLS 
OF RISE AND 

DECLINE.

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in terms of a fundamental antagonism.15 This she distinguishes from liberal 
conceptions, which are based on an “aggregative” model that understands 
the political in terms of the economy and the market, and from a deliberative 
model that understands the political as the application of morality. For 
Mouffe, the political has to do with passions, and to take a political stance 
will always involve a separation between an “us” and a “them,” which 
creates an asymmetry in the space in which the two parties are to meet. 
The problem for Mouffe becomes to what extent this antagonism can be 
transformed into an “agonism” that would allow passionate encounters 
while still mitigating or sublimating the violence of antagonism. How can 
we acknowledge the legitimacy of the opponent, without reference to a 
set of rules or a rational consensus to be achieved as the outcome? Does 
the shift to agonism not presuppose some standard according to which it 
can be construed as successful—or, inversely, as has been argued by Slavoj 
Žižek, must the idea, or ideal, of agonism, not have recourse to a more 
basic liberal-capitalist order that itself cannot be challenged?

Just as for Deutsche, this has important consequences for the notion 
of public space. Mouffe places her theory in clear opposition to the one 
proposed by Habermas, but also, although less clearly, to Hannah Arendt, 
whose conception of an “enlarged thought” and a political intersubjectivity 
draws on Kant’s aesthetics.16 For Mouffe, public space cannot be seen as one 
entity that could subsequently be occupied or compromised by external 
forces, rather it is a constitutive plurality in a sense that goes beyond the 
peaceful “space of appearance” as delineated by Arendt: it is a multiply 
contested and non-symmetric space, a battleground traversed by struggles 
for hegemony. If public space is the space where politics is realized, this 
can only occur through acts of confrontation and unmasking. What 
Mouffe proposes is that the public domain must be seen as an ongoing 
experimental construction, rather than as a regulative idea against which 
all empirical domains should be measured and against which they all will 
appear as deficient. 

The Antinomy of Public Space
How should we judge the conflict between those two stories? To some 

extent it is reminiscent of what Paul Ricoeur once called a “conflict of 
interpretations,”17 i.e. between a restorative hermeneutics that wants to return 
to an original sense buried under sediments of history, and a “hermeneutics 
of suspicion” in the wake of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, for which the 
given—consciousness, texts, or, as in this case, this strange entity called 
public space—always harbors inner contradictions that must be unearthed, 
and that eventually will destroy the unity of the object in question.



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But perhaps the choice of the word “hermeneutics” 
as an overarching term is misleading, since it glosses 
over the highly different conceptions of thought 
itself that we find in these two conceptions. At stake 
are not just methodologies of interpretation, but 
a kind of antinomy that lies deep in the heart of 
thought itself. But what, then, is this antinomy?

The term seems as such to already settle the 
conflict, since it belongs to the Kantian vocabulary. 
For Kant, an antinomy results from two conflicting 
interests, and his chief example is the notion of 
freedom: for the understanding, as the faculty that 
legislates over the science of nature, the interest lies 
in maximizing the scope of causality, and freedom 
is an impossible concept, since it would disrupt the 
causal chain. For the faculty of reason (as opposed 
to the faculty of understanding, and directed 
towards ideas), the interest is to safeguard a sphere 
of the supersensible that preserves the autonomy 
of rational agents. In natural science, causal chains 
must be seamless, and that free actions do not 
exist is not an empirical discovery, but an a priori 
requirement. For ethics, freedom is inversely what 
is required for the moral law to be at all applicable, 
and its status cannot be revoked by any reference to 
physics. What holds together these two claims is the 
architectonic of reason, which allows the sensible 
(nature) and the supersensible to co-exist.18 

Now, in the case of public space, just as in Kant’s 
analysis of freedom, both parties can argue their 
respective cases forcefully: the idealist account lays 
claim to an ethical necessity (no empirical facts can 
settle the question of what public space should be), 
whereas the genealogical seems to refer to a kind 
of sensible manifold (ethical ideals are not what 
matters, but rather significance lies in what people 
in fact do). What is striking, and rather different 
than in Kantian philosophy, is that the first version, 
which stresses universals and communicative 
action, tends to be pessimistic about the present 
and even more so about the future, whereas the 

      IF PUBLIC 
SPACE IS THE 

SPACE WHERE 
POLITICS IS 
REALIZED, 

THIS CAN ONLY 
OCCUR 

THROUGH ACTS 
OF CONFRONTATION 

AND UNMASKING.

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second version, which stresses contingency and forces, tends to see the 
future as open an undecided. What seems to be at stake here is thus not 
the difference between theoretical and practical reason, or between nature 
and freedom, as Kant would have it, but rather between two versions of 
freedom, which is why we cannot solve the issue by an appeal to some 
putative architecture of reason. The antinomy of public space in this sense 
testifies to division between two ideas or even ideals of philosophy, rather 
than to a split inside a particular philosophy.

Endnotes
1. The classic text is Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay, ‘An Answer to the 

Question: What is Enlightenment?’ in Immanuel Kant, Political 
Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge 
Univ. Press, 1990).

2. Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Mary C. Smith, tr. http://
www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html.

3. Translated in Political Writings (as in note 1).
4. I draw here on the commentary by Jean-François Lyotard, 

L’enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 1986).
5.  Which is not to say that their readings coincide: in many respects they 

differ sharply, in a way not unrelated to the antinomy between the two 
stories of public space that will be sketched in the following section.

6.  See Claude Lefort L’invention démocratique: Les limites de la 
domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981).

7.  Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen 
zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Luchterhand: Neuwied, 
1962), and Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativem Handelns 
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).

8. See for instance Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: 
A Transcendental Pragmatic Perspective, trans. Georgia Warnke 
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1984).

9. In another terminology, the idea of a procedural rationality endowed 
with an intentionally “thin” definition seems to deny the possibility 
of ”deep conflicts”, i.e., conflicts where the very nature of rules is 
at stake. Interestingly, such conflicts are abundant at the level that 
many (though not all) philosophers would see as the basic one, the 
foundations of mathematics and logic.

 10. See for instance the contributions in Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations 
on a Theme Park: The New American City and The End of Public 
Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). For a critical discussion of 
Sorkin’s account, as well as of similar proposals by Mike Davis, see 



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Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Men in Space,’ in Rosalyn 
Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics 
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). This is 
obviously not to deny the empirical pertinence 
of the analyses of late capitalist space and of 
the commodification of the urban landscape 
proposed by Sorkin and Davis; it does however 
mean to question their underlying narrative 
structure, which tends to project a past and 
more ideal situation or possibility that at one 
point were betrayed.

11. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New 
York: Random House, 1977).

12. While doubtless effective as an antidote to the 
traditional story, the image of a fall occurring at 
the beginning of the nineteenth century, should 
not lead us into believing that free public sphere 
once existed, and then vanished, but we should 
rather see one contradictory and tension-
laden structure displacing another, as Sennett 
shows. That the ideal of public man was highly 
disputed can be seen in the writings of Rousseau 
and Diderot. If Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le 
comédien shows how the actor’s distance from 
himself is a precondition for theater, then 
Rousseau can be said to invert this theory by 
making theater itself into a paradigm for false 
social relations, as in his Lettre à d’Alembert sur 
les spectacles. 

13. For Foucault’s account of Nietzsche, see 
‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ in: Michel 
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 
ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. 
Bouchard and Simon Sherry (Ithaca: Cornell 
University Press, 1977). Foucault says little 
about public space, but it would no doubt be 
fruitful to enter this complex via his analysis 
of Greek democracy and his discussion of 
parrhesia, “fearless speech,” which always 
introduces a difference that breaks with the 
merely formal symmetry of equals. See the 



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two last courses at the Collège de France, Le gouvernement de soi et 
des autres: Cours au Collège de France (1982-1983), ed. Frédéric Gros 
(Paris: Seuil ; 2008), and Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi 
et des autres II: Cours au Collège de France (1983-1984), ed. Frédéric 
Gros (Paris: Seuil: 2009).

14. See Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Agoraphobia,’ in: Roslyn Deutsche, Evictions: 
Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

15. For Mouffe’s views, see Chantal Mouffe, On the political (London: 
Routledge, 2005), and Chantal Moufe, ‘Agonistic Public Spaces, 
Democratic Politics, and the Dynamics of Passion,’ in: Joseph 
Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (eds:), 
Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art 
(New York and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008). For the relation to Carl 
Schmitt and the conception of the political as oriented along the axis 
friend-foe, see her anthology Chantal Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl 
Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999). 

16. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald 
Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1992).

17. See Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics 
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, new ed. 2007).

18. I disregard some of the more objectionable moves that permit Kant 
to close the gap between theoretical and practical reason, above all 
the reference to the thing itself, of which he says that it is at least not 
contradictory to assume would be the locus of a free, supersensible 
causality. Kant is perhaps too eager to close the gap, because of 
the demand for an architectonic unity of reason, even though his 
“dissolution” (Auflösung) of the antinomy is dependent on it, as I think 
is evinced by respective developments of the theme in Arendt and 
Lyotard.



In ordinary language, it is not very common to 
speak about ‘the political.’1 However, to distinguish 
between the political and politics opens up an 
important alley for reflection. I am not the first nor 
the only one to make this distinction. A variety of 
political theorists do the same, but with different 
remit. Some theorists envisage the political as a space 
of freedom and public deliberation. This we call the 
associative view of the political. Others understand 
it as a space of power and conflict, which we call 
the dissociative view. My understanding belongs 
to this second perspective. With the term ‘the 
political,’ I refer to the dimension of antagonism, 
which, I argue, is constitutive of human societies. 
Politics is the set of practices and institutions 
through which a certain order is created. This 
order organizes human coexistence in a context of 
conflict. According to the dissociative perspective, 
political questions always require decision making 
to choose between conflicting alternatives. And, 
contrary to the dominant view under neoliberalism 
today, those political decisions cannot be reduced 
to technical issues which can be solved by experts.       
In neoliberal societies, there is an incapacity to 
think politically. In this article, I will reflect upon 
the issue of public space and the potential of artistic 
practices in the context of conflict and antagonism.

1. The Political
To a great extent the contemporary incapacity 

to think politically is not only caused by the 
uncontested hegemony of neoliberalism, but also 
by liberalism in general. With “liberalism,” I do 
not mean “economic liberalism,” which is the basis 

On the Political, Public Space and the 
Possibility of a Critical Architecture

Chantal Mouffe



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of capitalism, nor “political liberalism,” as a set of political institutions, I 
refer here to the philosophical discourse, which has got many variances, 
some more progressive than others. Though there is no common essence, 
there is a multiplicity of what we could call, using an expression of 
Ludwig Wittgenstein, family resemblance. Save a few exceptions, the 
dominant tendency in liberal thought is characterised by a rationalist and 
individualist approach, which, in my view, is not able to adequately grasp 
the pluralistic nature of the social world with the conflicts that pluralism 
entails—conflicts for which there is no rational solution. The typical liberal 
understanding of pluralism is that we live in a world in which there are 
many perspectives, many values, and different beliefs. However, through 
serious deliberations and rational negotiations, these different perspectives 
can constitute harmonious and non-conflictual perspectives. This type 
of liberalism negates the political in its antagonistic dimension. One of 
its main tenets is a belief in the possibility of universal consensus, which 
can be established through strict rational reasoning. But to acknowledge 
the antagonism of the political underscores the inescapable moment of 
decision. I use ‘decision’ here in the Derridean sense. As Derrida insisted, to 
decide is always to decide in an undecidable terrain. A decision made after 
calculation, is not a decision at all. Decision-making in an undecidable 
terrain means choosing between alternatives that cannot be resolved 
through rational reasoning. The antagonism of the political reveals the 
limits of any rational consensus, and therefore is antithetical to the liberal 
vision.

When examining the different perspectives existing within contemporary 
liberal political thought, we can distinguish two main paradigms. The 
first is called the aggregative paradigm. There is a confluence with the 
associative view of the political, but it is not exactly the same. The 
aggregative view envisages politics as the establishment of a compromise 
between competing forces in society. Individual participants are portrayed 
as rational beings, driven by the maximization of their own interest. This 
is an instrumental understanding of acting; (it is) market ideology applied 
to the domain of politics. The instrumental view easily apprehends politics 
through economics and is often dominant in political science departments, 
for instance in the broadly accepted rational choice theory. 

The second paradigm is dominant within philosophical discourses, 
and is often called the deliberative paradigm. Two of their representatives 
are John Rawls in the United States and Jürgen Habermas in Germany. 
They somehow developed their views in reaction to the instrumentalist 
model. Their argument is that there is more to politics than just the 
search for personal interests. Instead of an instrumental rationality, they 



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propose a communicative rationality, believing that 
it is possible to create a rational moral consensus 
by means of free discussion. In this case, politics is 
not apprehended through economics, but through 
ethics or morality. What these views leave aside 
through their rationalist approach is precisely what, 
to me, is the specificity of politics: the fact that in 
politics we are always dealing with a “we” as opposed 
to a “them.” This does not mean that antagonism is 
always present, but it is an ever-present possibility.

Another drawback of the rationalism of liberalism 
is that it is not able to acknowledge the crucial role 
played by what I call passions in politics. I refer here 
to the affective dimension, which is central to the 
constitution of any collective form of identification. 
Political identification is always collective, and this 
implies an affective dimension. Liberalism, with its 
methodological individualism, is not able to grasp 
the specificity of the political, the collective and the 
affective.

In my work, I argue that only when we 
acknowledge the political in its antagonistic 
dimension, can we pose the central question for 
democratic politics. This is not to question how to 
negotiate a compromise, or what kind of procedure is 
needed to reach a rational, fully inclusive consensus. 
It is impossible to establish a consensus without 
exclusion. Therefore, despite what many liberals 
want us to believe, the specificity of democratic 
politics is not to overcome this “we/them” 
opposition, but how to construct this opposition to 
be compatible with the recognition of pluralism. In 
order to answer this question, I use the notion of 
the “constitutive outside,” a term proposed by the 
American philosopher Henry Staten in his book 
Wittgenstein and Derrida.2 He uses this term to refer 
to a number of terms that are developed by Jacques 
Derrida, like Derrida’s notions of supplement, 
trace, and différance. The aim of those notions is 
to highlight the fact that the creation of an identity 
always implies the establishment of difference. This 

     THE 
ANTAGONISM 

OF THE POLITICAL 
REVEALS THE 

LIMITS OF ANY 
RATIONAL 

CONSENSUS, AND 
THEREFORE IS 
ANTITHETICAL 

TO THE LIBERAL 
VISION.

“

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difference is moreover often constructed on the basis of a hierarchy, for 
instance man/woman, black/white. This view is based on Ferdinand de 
Saussure’s claim that every identity is relational, and acknowledges that 
the affirmation of a difference is the precondition for the existence of any 
identity. In other words, the perception of something other that constitutes 
its exterior is the precondition of existence of an identity. If we accept this, 
and apply it to the field of politics, we can understand that the constitution 
of the “we” is what politics is about and that politics cannot exist without 
the determination of a “them.” The identity of a “we” needs to have a 
constitutive outside, a “them.” But this does not mean that such a relation 
is necessarily antagonistic. 

In politics we thus deal with collective identities on the basis of “we/
them.” Those differences can simply be a pure difference. To give an 
example: “we,” the French, need to have a “them,” the German. Or “we,” 
the Catholic, and “them,” the Protestant or the Muslim. This is not 
necessarily a relation of antagonism. But under certain conditions, this 
“we/them,” can become an antagonism, and can be constructed on the 
basis of friend and enemy. This happens, for instance, when the “them” 
is perceived as questioning the identity of the “we,” thus threatening its 
existence. From that moment on, any form of “we/them” relation, being 
from religious, ethnic, economic, or other origin, becomes antagonistic. An 
example that I often give to my students is the disintegration of Yugoslavia. 
The Slovenian, the Bosnian, the Croat and the Serb were not enemies, 
but in certain circumstances, such as those in the death of Tito and the 
coming to power of Milošević, who tried to establish Serbian supremacy, 
they began to see each other as enemies. Their relationship became 
antagonistic. This is important to realize, the ever-present possibility that 
“we/them” relations become antagonistic.  

Upon that remark, I would like to stress that identities are always a 
result of processes of identification. Identities, as Freud claims, can never 
be completely fixed, Therefore, we are never confronted with “we/them” 
opposition that expresses essentialist pre-existing identities. This is an 
important point to stress, since the “them” represent the condition of 
possibility of the “we,” as I argued above. This means that the constitution 
of a specific “we” always depends on the type of “them” from which it 
is differentiated. The crucial point is that this allows us to envisage the 
possibility of a different type of “we/them” relation according to the way 
the “them” is constructed. 

Since all forms of political identities entail a “we/them” distinction, 
this means that the possibility of emergence of antagonism can never 
be eliminated. I thus assert that the political belongs to our ontological 



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condition. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 
Ernesto Laclau and I argue that next to the concept 
of antagonism, there is another concept which 
is crucial to address the political: the concept of 
hegemony.3 To acknowledge the dimension of the 
political, the ever-present possibility of antagonism, 
requires coming to terms with the lack of a final 
ground and the undecidability that pervades every 
order. It requires recognizing what we call the 
hegemonic nature of every kind of social order. 
Every society is the product of a series of practices 
which attempt to establish an order in a specific 
context. But this context is always contingent. 
It is important to realise that according to such a 
conception, society cannot be seen as the unfolding 
of a logic that will be exterior to itself, whatever 
the source of this logic will be — the forces of 
production for Marx, nor the development of the 
spirit for Hegel. Every order is the temporary and 
precarious articulation of contingent practices. This 
means that things could always have been otherwise 
and that every order is predicated on the exclusion 
of other possibilities. To acknowledge this can also 
be called political: it is always the expression of a 
particular structure of power relations. There are 
always other possibilities that have been repressed, 
but that can also be reactivated. Every hegemonic 
order is susceptible to being challenged by counter-
hegemonic practices, practices that will attempt to 
disarticulate the existing order, to install another 
form of hegemony. This is what the agonistic 
struggle is about: the struggle between hegemonies.

The political is linked to those acts of hegemonic 
institution, and in this sense can be differentiated 
from the social. This distinction between the social 
and political is important. These two domains are 
two different ways of looking at the same thing. The 
social is the basis of ‘sedimented practices’, referring 
to practices that conceal the act of the contingent 
political institution. These practices appear as if 
they were self-grounded. Or to put it differently, 

     THIS DOES 
NOT MEAN THAT 
ANTAGONISM IS 

ALWAYS PRESENT, 
BUT IT IS AN 

EVER-PRESENT 
POSSIBILITY.

“

”



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we take these practices for granted. There is a need for such sedimented 
practices, as you cannot have everything in perpetual flux. The social and 
the political have the status of what Martin Heidegger called ‘existentials,’ 
which are the necessary forms of societal life. 

2. On Public Spaces
Once the ever-present possibility of antagonism is acknowledged, one 

can understand why one of the main tasks of democratic politics consists in 
defusing the potential antagonism that exists in social relations. A society 
cannot exist in constant flux or civil war. There is a need for some form of 
stability. If we accept that this stability cannot be achieved by transcending 
the “we/them” relation, but only by constructing it in a different way, then 
the following question arises: what could constitute a tame relation, a 
sublimated form of antagonism? What form of “we/them” will this imply? 
Or to put it differently, how could conflict be accepted as legitimate and 
take a form that does not destroy the political association? This requires 
that some kind of common bond exists between the parties in conflict 
so that they will not treat their opponents as enemies to be eradicated. 
That would be a form of civil war, because they will see their demands 
as illegitimate. This is precisely what happens in an antagonistic enemy 
relation. However, the opponents cannot be seen simply as competitors 
whose interests can be dealt with either through negotiation, the aggregative 
conception, or reconciled by deliberation (the deliberative view). In that 
case, the antagonistic element will simply have been eliminated.  The two 
solutions offered by liberalism are not adequate, precisely because they do 
not recognise the inevitable dimension of antagonism and the fact of the 
hegemonic conception of society. If we thus want to acknowledge on one 
side the inevitability of the antagonistic dimension, while on the other 
allowing for the possibility of its sublimation, of its taming, we need to 
envisage a third type of relation. And this is the type of relation that I have 
proposed to call agonism. 

Antagonism is a “we/them” relation in which the two sides are enemies, 
wherein these two sides do not share any common ground. There is no 
symbolic space among them. Agonism is also a “we/them” relation with 
conflicting parties. However, with agonism, although acknowledging that 
there is no rational solution to their conflict, the two sides recognise the 
legitimacy of their opponents. They are adversaries, not enemies. This means 
that when in conflict, they see themself as belonging to the same political 
association. They are sharing a common symbolic space and it is within this 
space that the conflict takes place. What exists among them is a conflictual 
consensus. They have different interpretations of the shared political values. 



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What is at stake in agonistic struggle is in fact the 
very configuration of power relations around which 
a given society is structured. It is a struggle between 
opposing hegemonic projects, which cannot be 
reconciled rationally. The antagonistic dimension is 
always present, it is a real confrontation, but one 
which is played out under regulated conditions by 
democratic procedures. The agonistic conception of 
democracy acknowledges the contingent character 
of the hegemonic political-economic articulation, 
which informs a specific configuration of a society 
at a given moment. This is a precarious and 
pragmatic construction, which can be disarticulated 
and transformed as a result of the agonistic struggle 
among the adversaries. Contrary to the values of 
the liberal model, the agonistic approach recognises 
that society is always politically instituted. It never 
forgets that the terrain in which the hegemonic 
intervention takes place is necessarily the outcome 
of previous hegemonic practices. This is why the 
agonistic model denies the possibility of a non-
adversarial democratic politics and criticises those 
who, by ignoring this dimension of the political, 
reduce politics to a set of supposedly technical moves 
and neutral procedures. Unfortunately, the latter is 
the dominant view in the neoliberal hegemonic, as 
I stated previously.

The most important consequence of the 
agonistic model of democracy for the issue of 
public space is that this conception challenges the 
widespread notions that inform most liberal visions, 
wherein public space is regarded as the terrain 
where consensus could possibly be reached. For the 
agonistic model, public spaces are the battlefields 
where different hegemonic projects are confronted 
without any possibility of a final reconciliation. In 
this view, we are not dealing with one single public 
space. According to the hegemonic approach, public 
spaces are always plural. The agonistic confrontation 
takes place in a multiplicity of discursive surfaces. 
The second important point I want to make is that 

    FOR THE 
AGONISTIC MODEL, 

PUBLIC SPACES 
ARE THE 

BATTLEFIELDS 
WHERE DIFFERENT 

HEGEMONIC 
PROJECTS ARE 
CONFRONTED 
WITHOUT ANY 

POSSIBILITY 
OF A FINAL 

RECONCILIATION.

“

”



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while there is no underlying principle of unity, no predetermined centre 
to this diversity of spaces, there always exist diverse forms of articulation 
amongst them. We are not faced with the dispersion envisaged by some 
modernist thinkers. This is, for instance, the big difference between our 
approach and the one of Michel Foucault. Many parts of our previously 
mentioned book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy are influenced by 
Foucault, such as the conception of power. But we part company with 
Foucault when he asserts the pure multiplicity of public spaces. We argue, 
on the contrary, that public spaces are always hegemonically structured. 
Given the fact that hegemony results from the specific articulation of a 
diversity of spaces, this means that the hegemonic struggle always consists 
in the attempt to create a different form of articulation. 

This not only differentiates our view from Foucault’s, it is also 
differentiated from Jürgen Habermas’s view, who reflected a lot about 
the political public space. When he envisages a public sphere, Habermas 
presents it as a place where deliberation aiming at the rational consensus 
takes place. To be sure, Habermas accepts that it is improbable that such a 
consensus could effectively be reached, given the limitation of social life. He 
therefore presents this consensus, this ideal situation of communication, 
as a regulative idea. I would argue that this is, though slightly different, 
fundamentally the same conception. According to the perspective that I 
am advocating, the impediments to Habermas’s ideal speech situation are 
not empirical. For Habermas, we would never be able to reach it, because 
we will never be able to completely coincide with our rational self, to leave 
aside all our particularities. The impediments are therefore empirical. To 
me, however, those impediments are not empirical, they are ontological. 
And the rational consensus that Habermas presents as a regulative idea is, 
in my view, a conceptual impossibility. 

My idea of agonistic public space also differs from Hannah Arendt’s. 
In my view, the main problem with Arendt’s understanding of agonism is, 
to put it in a nutshell, that it is an agonism without antagonism. Arendt 
puts a great emphasis on plurality and insists that politics deals with the 
community and reciprocity of human beings which are different from 
one another. This is essential to her view. But she never acknowledges 
that this plurality is at the origin of antagonistic conflicts. According to 
Arendt, to think politically is to develop the ability to see things from a 
multiplicity of perspectives. In a reference to Immanuel Kant, in her book 
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, she refers to his idea of enlarged 
thought.4 For Arendt, this idea is a model of political practices, which 
testifies that her conception of pluralism is in fact inscribed in the horizon 
of an intersubjective agreement. What Arendt looks for in Kant’s doctrine 



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of aesthetic judgment is in fact a procedure for 
ascertaining intersubjective agreement in the public 
space. This is why I will argue that while significant 
differences in their respective approaches exist, 
Arendt and Habermas both end up envisaging the 
public space as one free from antagonism. Both 
belong to the associative conception of politics, 
which is distinct from the dissociative conception 
of politics that I advocate.

3. On Artistic Practices and the Possibility of a Critical 
Architecture
So far, I have argued that by bringing to the 

fore the discursive character of the social and the 
multiplicity of discursive practices through which 
our world is constructed, the hegemonic approach is 
particularly fruitful when it comes to apprehending 
the relation between art and politics. This relation 
should not be envisaged in terms of two separate 
constituted fields, art on one side, politics on the 
other, between which a relation will need to be 
established. According to this approach there is an 
aesthetic dimension in the political and a political 
dimension in art. Indeed, from the point of view 
of the theory of hegemony, artistic and cultural 
practices play a role in the constitution and the 
maintenance of a given symbolic order, as well as 
in challenging this hegemonic order. And this is 
why artistic and cultural practices necessarily have 
a political dimension. This is why I have suggested 
that it is not useful to make a distinction between 
political and non-political art. I therefore prefer to 
speak about critical art. Identifying the critical to 
the political implies that all artistic practices that 
are not critical are not political either. But, as said, 
there is a political dimension in all forms of art. The 
importance of the hegemonic approach for critical 
art is that it highlights the fact that the construction 
of a hegemony is not limited to the traditional 
political institutions, but that it also takes place in 
a multiplicity of spaces, which are usually called 

    IT IS NOT 
USEFUL 

TO MAKE A 
DISTINCTION 

BETWEEN 
POLITICAL AND 
NON-POLITICAL 

ART. 

“

”



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civil society. This is where, as Antonio Gramsci has shown, a particular 
conception of the world is established and a specific understanding of 
reality is defined—what he calls the common sense. This common sense 
provides the terrain in which specific forms of subjectivity are constructed. 
Gramsci insists that the domain of culture plays a crucial role there, as it 
is one of the terrains where common sense is built and subjectivities are 
created.

This hegemonic approach reveals that artistic practices constitute an 
important terrain for the construction of political identities. It allows 
us to grasp the decisive role that those practices could also play in the 
counter-hegemonic struggle, because they contribute to the emergence 
of new forms of subjectivity. An important dimension of the counter-
hegemonic struggle is indeed the transformation of the common sense as 
the space where specific forms of subjectivity are constructed. From this 
perspective, critical art is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices 
that are going to contribute to question the dominant hegemony. The 
objective is a transformation of political identities through the creation of 
new practices, new language games, that will mobilize affects in a way that 
allows for the disarticulation of the framework in which current forms of 
identification are taking place. As such, artistic practices allow other forms 
of identification to emerge.

It is worth indicating that there are different answers to the question 
of what critical art is. In fact, it is important to acknowledge that not all 
conceptions of radical politics envisage the criticality of artistic practices 
in the same way. We can, I would like to argue, roughly distinguish two 
main strategies to visualize radical politics, one that I have in my book 
Agonistics called ‘engagement with’ and the other ‘desertion from.’5  
The second one, which is promoted by thinkers like Michael Hardt and 
Antonio Negri and their followers, reject any engagement with the state 
and all existing institutions. In their recent work, Hardt and Negri have 
moved a bit from that view, but most of their followers have not. The 
strategy that they advocate is one of exodus, that calls for the desertion of 
the places of power, which is justified by the claim that under the current 
condition of cognitive capitalism, exodus is the only form of resistance to 
the domination of bio-power. Desertion should include the institutions 
of the art world, which they see as totally instrumentalized by the creative 
industries. The art world has become complicit with capitalism, and thus 
can no longer provide a site of resistance. 

Against this view of radical politics in terms of exodus, the strategy 
that the hegemonic approach advocates, is one that, again borrowing 
a term from Gramsci, we call a “war of positions.” It does not consist 



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in withdrawing from existing institutions, but 
by engaging with them in order to bring about a 
profound transformation in the way they function. 
This war of positions targets the nodal points 
around which neoliberal hegemony is established, 
disarticulating the key discourses and practices 
through which neoliberal hegemony is sustained 
and reproduced. It thus consists of the diversity 
of counter-hegemonic practices and interventions, 
which operates in a multiplicity of domains: 
economic, legal, political, and cultural. The domain 
of culture plays a crucial role in this war of positions, 
because this is the space where the common sense 
is established and subjectivities are constructed. 
Critical artistic and cultural practices can contribute 
to the fostering of an agonistic confrontation by 
making visible what the dominant consensus tends 
to obscure and obliterate. This permits challenges to 
the existing hegemony. I want to insist that this can 
be done in a diversity of ways, in a multiplicity of 
interventions and in active engagement with a wide 
range of institutions in a variety of spaces. There 
are many terrains in which artistic and cultural 
practices can unsettle the established common sense 
and contribute to the emergence of new forms of 
subjectivity. 

But what about architecture? Can it be critical 
as well? Recognizing the role of cultural artistic 
practices in the construction of a hegemony 
contributes to vizualising the role that architectural 
practices could play in the construction, 
reproduction, and transformation of a hegemony. 
The possibility of a critical architecture starts with 
the acknowledgment that the social is always 
discursively constructed and that architecture 
also has a political dimension. However, it is one 
thing to recognize its political dimension, another 
to determine whether this political dimension is 
critical. As I have stated previously, the political 
does not equate with the critical. Once we can 
recognize the political dimension of architecture, 

   THE POSSIBILITY 
OF A CRITICAL 

ARCHITECTURE 
STARTS WITH THE 

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
THAT THE SOCIAL 

IS ALWAYS 
DISCURSIVELY 

CONSTRUCTED 
AND THAT 

ARCHITECTURE 
ALSO HAS A 

POLITICAL 
DIMENSION.  

“

”



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we can follow different strategies to guide this political dimension. What 
strategy will then orient us in a critical direction? The strategy that Laclau 
and I advocated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the strategy that 
I still advocate in my book, For a Left Populism, is a strategy of critical 
engagement with institutions in order to transform them.6 This is a matter 
of both the disarticulation of a given hegemony, as well as the importance 
of creating something new. A critical approach always consists of a double 
movement, of disarticulation and rearticulation. 

It seems to me that this strategy of “engagement with” is particularly 
suited to critical architectural practices. Moreover, I cannot really think 
of architectural practices that correspond to a strategy of exodus. In 
architecture, one is always, it seems to me, dealing with presentation, 
construction, and mediation, and those are precisely the things that the 
exodus strategy rejects. 

Endnotes
1. This article is a lightly edited transcript of Chantal Mouffe’s keynote 

lecture at the 5th Biennial Conference of the International Society of 
the Philosophy of Architecture (ISPA), held via Zoom at Monte Verita, 
Ascona, Switzerland, on July 4th, 2021.

2. Henri Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of 
Nebraska Press, 1986).

3. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: 
Towards Radical Democratic Politics (London/New York: Verso, 2001). 

4. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald 
Beiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

5. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically (London/
New York: Verso, 2013).

6. Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).



There is perhaps no more compelling example 
of Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance” than 
Lina Bo Bardi’s Museum of Art in São Paulo, MASP, 
designed in 1957 for the Assis Chateaubriand art 
collection previously housed in an old downtown 
building. Although the work of the Italian émigré 
architect Lina Bo Bardi was always independent 
of the so-called Paulista School, the audaciously 
monumental structure of her museum, suspended 
clear of the ground from two deep, long span 
reinforced concrete beams resting on four equally 
gigantic reinforced concrete piers, served to create 
a partially covered terrace, opening off the Avenida 
Paulista and overlooking the verdant landscape of 
Trianon Park. Ever since its completion in 1968 
which happened to coincide with the worldwide 
student revolt, this space has served as the ultimate 
Paulista symbolic site for spontaneous political 
demonstrations. As an Arendtian cultural nexus 
with a similar political potential Bo Bardi’s museum 
will be matched at virtually the same time by a top-
lit, equally monumental core incorporated into 
the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism built on 
the campus of São Paulo University to designs of 
the architect João Vilanova Artigas, between 1959 
and 1961. The result, in both instances was the 
creation of a res publica that corresponded, however 
inadvertently, to Arendt’s concept of “the space of 
appearance,” as first defined by her under the rubric 
work in her magnum opus The Human Condition 
of 1958: 

The manmade world of things, the human 
artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home 

The Space of Appearance Within the
Megalopolis. Architectural Culture-
Politics of São Paulo 1957-2017

Kenneth Frampton



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for immortal men, stability of which will endure and outlast the ever-
changing movement of their lives and actions, only insomuch as it 
transcends the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption 
and the sheer utility of objects produced for use.  Life in its non-
biological sense, the span of time each man has between birth and death, 
manifests itself in action and speech…If the animal laborans needs the 
help of the homo faber to ease his labor and remove his pain, and if 
mortals need his help to erect a home on earth, acting and speaking 
men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is the 
help of artists, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders 
or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the 
story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.  In order to be what 
the world is always meant to be, home for men during their life on 
earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech, for 
activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an 
entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication by 
which the world itself and all things in it are produced.1

Although Arendt never alludes to the megalopolis per se, which in any case 
in the late 50’s had yet to be acknowledged this is the “placeless” landscape 
she foresees in The Human Condition when, in the fifth chapter, she defines 
the “space of appearance” in the following terms:

The space of appearance comes into being whenever men are gathered 
together in a manner of speech and action and therefore precedes all 
formal constitution of the public realm…Only where potentialities 
of action are always present can power remain with them and the 
foundation of cities which, as city states have remained paradigmatic 
for all Western political organization is therefore the most important 
prerequisite for power…Power preserves the public realm and the space 
of appearance and as such it is the life blood of the human artifice…
Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the 
world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things 
to which each isolated individual was free to add one more object…
without the enduring permanence of the human artifice there cannot 
be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall 
come after…2

And it is also much the same megapolitan landscape she has in mind when 
in her later critique of consumerism, she writes:



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In our need for more and more rapid replacement 
of worldly things around us we can no longer 
afford to use them, to respect and preserve their 
inherent durability, we must consume, devour, 
as it were, our houses and furniture and cars 
as though they were the good things of nature 
which spoil uselessly if they are not drawn swiftly 
into the never-ending cycle of man’s metabolism 
with nature.  It is as though we had forced open 
the distinguishing boundaries which protected 
the world, the human artifice, from nature, the 
biological processes which goes on in its very 
midst as well as the natural cyclical processes 
which surround it delivering and abandoning 
to them the always threatened stability of the 
human world.3

In the last chapter of The Human Condition, entitled 
the ‘Vita Activa and the Modern Age,’ Arendt 
touches on the socio-economic consequences of the 
mass ownership of the car without which the demise 
of the city and the emergence of the megalopolis 
would not have been possible.

If, in concluding, we return once more to 
the Archimedian point and apply it, as Kafka 
warned us not to do, to man himself and to 
what he is doing to this earth, it at once becomes 
manifest that all of his activities, watched from 
a sufficiently removed vantage point in the 
universe, would appear not as activities of any 
kind but as processes, so that as a scientist recently 
put it, modern motorization would appear like 
a process of biological mutation which human 
bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells 
of steel.  For the watcher from the universe, this 
mutation would be no more or less mysterious 
than the mutation which now goes on before our 
eyes in those small living organisms which we 
fought with antibiotics and which mysteriously 
have developed new strains to resist us…we live 

  although 
arendt never 

alludes to the 
megalopolis, 
this is surely 

the placeless 
landscape she 
foresees in the 

human condition. 

“

”



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in this society as though we were as far removed from our own human 
existence as we are from the infinitely small and the infinitely large 
which, even if they could be perceived by the finest instruments, are too 
far away from us to be experienced.4  
   

The Arendtian ideal of the city-state was not only predicated on the remote 
model of the ancient Greek polis but also on the or worker’s councils that 
emerged spontaneously in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 
1917, only to be instantly suppressed by the triumphant Bolsheviks party.  
Arendt’s other example of council formation were the groups formed 
during the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, which she equally admired and 
which were also summarily suppressed. Perhaps no one has understood 
Arendt’s concept of direct democracy better than Shmuel Lederman in 
his study Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy of 2019 wherein he 
wrote:

Ultimately, the different way Arendt conceptualized the meaning and 
the potential of the councils emanated not so much from historical 
idiosyncrasies as from the different ontological and epistemological 
foundations of her political thought namely from the way she “politicized” 
German existentialism and used Heidegger’s phenomenological method 
to offer a strikingly original analysis of the experience of action and 
speech in the public sphere.5

Later, Lederman cites two recent examples of participatory democracy: 
first, the Indian state of Kerala, which, had, in the past, been under a 
democratically elected communist government and second, the city of 
Porto Alegre in the South of Brazil. Of this last Lederman writes:

… In the spirit of the council tradition, participatory budgeting in 
Puerta Alegre continually challenged the very structure of hegemonic 
representative democracy…participatory institutions now play a role 
channeling demands emerging from organized communities;…the 
blurring between state and society occurs as government officials and 
community leaders now occupy a space within state institutions…(in 
recent years 100,000 residents have taken part) in a process prioritizing 
public works, such as street paving, the laying of water and sewerage 
lines, the building of new schools and hospitals and so on.6

 
As the title of this essay intimates, “spaces of appearance,” in a cultural 
if not an overtly political sense, have intermittently appeared over the 



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years within the exceptionally vast and placeless 
megalopolis of São Paulo. Such spaces have been 
an intrinsic part of the urban culture of São Paulo 
since the foundation of the SESC organization (the 
Serviço Social do Comércio; EN: Social Service of 
Commerce) in 1945, which was conceived from the 
outset as providing a certain sector of workers with 
beneficial social, recreational and cultural facilities. 
The socio-cultural agenda of this welfare provision 
was first given an architectural formulation in the 
so-called SESC Pompeia designed by Lina Bo Bardi 
in 1977, in collaboration with Marcelo Ferraz. 
This work entailed the conversion of a disused, 
single story factory in the center of the city into a 
complex combining multiple facilities, including 
an 800-seat restaurant, a reading room, a library, a 
750-seat theatre and a dental clinic. Bo Bardi would 
add to this same complex a new multi-story sports 
center, housing among other facilities a gymnasium 
and indoor swimming pool. This new addition was 
built out of exposed, in situ reinforced concrete in 
manner of Le Corbusier’s bêton brut.  Its multi-
story, silo-like form, linked by ramps to a concrete 
access tower, was given an industrial character so as 
to appear as if it had always existed in relation to 
the original single-story, monitor-lit factory. The 
interstitial space between the two was landscaped 
in such a way as to provide a nominal, artificial 
“beach” in which users could sun bathe.

This achievement was echoed in 2017 by the 
realization of another SESC complex within the São 
Paulo megalopolis; the so-called SESC 24 de Maio 
built to the designs of the late Paulista architect 
Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who collaborated with 
one of his former pupils, Maria Moreira, a founding 
partner in the practice, MMBB. Here again we have 
the of SESC commissioning the re-use of an existing 
structure, this time a disused department store which 
since it was largely ruined had to be extensively 
rebuilt. Apart from providing the usual mix of SESC 
amenities, the entire work was predicated on the 

“spaces of 
appearance,” 

in a cultural if 
not an overtly 
political sense, 

have been an 
intrinsic part 
of the urban 

culture of 
São Paulo 

since the 
foundation of 

the SESC 
organization 

in 1945.

“

”



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heroic idea of building a large swimming pool on top of an existing 13-story 
structure. This daring engineering concept was predicated on supporting 
the pool and the rest of the building on four gigantic reinforced concrete 
columns, each measuring 1.2 meters in diameter. These four columns were 
centered on the four corners of a square, set within the virtual square of 
the original building with a continuous pedestrian access ramp rising up 
to one side of the column grid. The pool on the roof was surely a manifest 
improvement on the narrow “urban beach” which had been a key feature in 
the SESC Pompeia. The raison d’etre behind this seemingly counter-intuitive 
decision to place the heavy weight of the pool at the top of the building 
would be accounted for by the architect in the following:

The pool choses its place not the architect.  A sunny, open pool, despite 
the winter, is completely different from a closed, heated pool.  My 
image is Copacabana, Leblon, Ipanema!7

In a conversation with the Chilean architect Enrique Walker in 2018, 
Mendes da Rocha will make the ideological stratagem of the Paulista 
School of Architecture explicit, in his response to Walker’s question as to 
the political implications of the SESC 24 de Maio, when he remarked: 

Every project is a political statement. The project idea is one of projection 
of the future.  So, the intention is to imagine what we should be, what 
we can be. The design is not simply a matter of architecture…Generally 
speaking, society throughout the world is exclusive, in principle. It 
always protects itself from free public action: these are the famous gated 
communities, the buildings with security. We made this building open 
to public use as much as possible. And SESC comes into that as well, 
which tells us something about SESC policies.  So, everything we do has 
a political value; there is a political essence in the idea of decision. And 
the new occupation of an existing building is part of a very interesting 
policy linked to the economy. You are better off reusing buildings rather 
than discarding them … Every construction, every action of ours has 
value, a political essence, which must be read between the lines of what 
is there…in architecture in particular, the first thing it entails is to 
seduce others so that they can see the dimensions of what, despite the 
circumstances we must do.8

Among the architects practicing in São Paulo over the last half of the 20th 
century there has perhaps been no figure who has been more aware of the 
profound challenges posed by the São Paulo megalopolis, now covering a 



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million square kilometers with a population of 30 
million people, than Paulo Mendes da Rocha. As 
he put it at an earlier moment when the population 
stood at 20 million: “it would have better to have 
built ten cities of 2 million each.” For Mendes da 
Rocha the megalopolis has been a challenge that can 
only be significantly addressed by creating public 
spaces, within which to resist the overwhelmingly 
disjunctive “non-place” of the megalopolis, not only 
in terms of culture-politics but also psychologically. 
Hence his penchant for creating microcosmic 
public realms such as his Poupa Tempo, the so-called 
“time-saving” building realized in the center of the 
city in 2008. The Swiss architect Annette Spiro’s 
appraisal of this work encapsulates the ennobling 
quality of this mutual interface between the general 
public and the municipality; a building that in 
effect serves as a range of offices for the granting 
of licenses and the payment of rates, taxes and 
fees, etc. In her view: “what could have easily been 
a labyrinth of bureaucracy is exactly the opposite; 
a singular 300-meter-long space, a bridge, an airy 
hall, an elongated public square…By virtue of one 
grand gesture, urbanistic, functional and spatial 
intentions are cogently satisfied.”9

In this one work one is able to appreciate fully 
the underlying ideology of the São Paulo school 
of architecture as this was initially envisaged 
by the architect, João Vilanova Artigas and the 
historian-theorist, Flavio Motta; that is to say the 
accommodation of socio-cultural and politically 
progressive programs within the fabric of tectonically 
articulated, monumental form. It is this that surely 
accounts for Mendes da Rocha’s assertion that 
engineering and architecture should be one and the 
same, although he would be the first to concede 
that this tectonic ethos is not, in and of itself, able 
to serve as an adequate point of departure before the 
dystopic fragmentation of the megalopolis for, as he 
would put it: “A city’s memory is not a continuous 
accumulation of eternities. It can only be preserved 

Every 
project is 

a political 
statement.

“
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in its historical discontinuity. We have to have the courage to face this 
inevitable discontinuity and turn it into stimulus.”10

In this regard Mendes da Rocha’s capacity to imagine and create spaces 
of public appearance would be particularly challenged in 2000 when he 
received from both Rio de Janeiro and Paris separate commissions to design 
sports facilities as part of their rival bids to host the Olympic games of 2008. 
What is significant about these two quite different proposals, with the one 
much more extensive and ambitious than the other, is that they were both 
designed for the worldwide megalopoli, i.e. for universal placelessness just 
as prevalent in the urbanistic chaos surrounding the Hausmannian core 
of Paris, as it is throughout the vast extent of the São Paulo megalopolis 
and where the one would consist of a number of different interventions 
on multiple sites, the other consisted of a single large stadium related to 
a pre-existing canal and podium of smaller stadia accommodating various 
specialized sports, i.e.  the so-called “sports boulevard.” What Mendes da 
Rocha had to say about his various proposals for the urbanized region of 
São Paulo emphasizes the potential opportunity provided by the games 
as an incentive for the reconstruction of city form.  As he would write of 
his piecemeal project of repairing the degradation of megalopolitan fabric 
around São Paulo:

… It proposes to intervene in places that today, despite their effective 
urban structuring are nonetheless degraded, as happens in all the world’s 
dynamic cities, with railway stations, unwanted polluted waterways and 
unexpected empty lots.  Thus, the proposal envisages the urbanization 
of abandoned areas, weaving houses, with new leisure, health and 
education facilities right into the existing urban fabric.11

There are perhaps no two works from the middle of the last century having 
more disparate implications than Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition 
of 1958 and Jean Gottman’s Megalopolis of 1962 for while Arendt’s 
concept of “the space of appearance” may be seen in retrospect as being of 
importance for the practice of architecture, Gottman’s relevance resided 
in the fact that he was the first to recognize that the urbanized region was 
already an emergent and universal condition. This, is ever more the case 
today as we veer towards the urbanization of 75% of world’s population by 
2050, according to the three-volume study The Endless City, published by 
the London School of Economics in 2007. In this regard, it may well be that 
Brazil in general and São Paulo in particular proffer a range of socio-cultural 
interventions that are of particular pertinence today given the inevitable 
wholesale urbanization of the planet. I have in mind in the first instance 



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the extraordinary capacity of Paulista municipality 
to build a large number of school-cum-community 
centers for the poorest sectors of society. There is 
surely no school building program of comparable 
stature and speed of realization anywhere else in the 
world today. This exceptional achievement suggests 
that even under globalized capitalism there is much 
to be said for the potential of the city state or the 
urbanized region to overcome the political ‘non-
place’ of the megalopolis in its most alienated form. 
This much seems to be implied by Chantal Mouffe’s 
recent thesis of Agonistics, first published in 2013 
as a political stratagem to overcome the current 
impasse of representational democracy.  In this she 
cites with approval the political philosophy of the 
Italian intellectual, Massimo Cacciari, who having 
served twice as the mayor of Venice, recommends 
a future policy in which he advocates “federation 
from the bottom” as opposed to the current union of 
European nation states which although they derive 
from representational democracies, are nonetheless 
subject to the top-down regulatory power of the 
European Union.  In her appraisal of Cacciari’s 
thesis, Mouffe writes: 

What Cacciari advocates can be conceived as a 
type of federal union in which the component 
units would not be limited to nation states and in 
which the regions would also play an important 
role. From the point of view of an agnostic 
model for Europe, I find particularly interesting 
his claim that such a union would manifest a 
form of autonomy exercised in systems which 
are integrated in a conflictive mode, and that 
it would combine solidarity and competition.  
Incorporating Cacciari’s proposals, we could 
imagine a European Union that would not only 
be a demio-cracy composed of nation states, 
but one where there would be a multiplicity 
of different kinds of demio, where democracy 
could be exercised at different levels and in a 

It is of the 
utmost import-

ance that the 
architect should 

have conceived of 
his intervention 

in terms of 
giving rise to 

auditoria and 
their attendant 

“spaces of 
appearance” 

without which 
architecture, has 
no socio-political 

cultural 
significance.

“

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multiplicity of ways.  Such a view recognizes and articulates different 
forms of collective identities and their new modes of co-operation.12

Of equal consequence as “spaces of appearance” has been the exemplary 
policy pursued by the city during the first decade of the 21st century wherein 
it would realize an extensive program of school building throughout the far-
flung periphery of the city, situating these schools in the midst of center-less 
favelas, that is in the heart of spontaneous, self-built housing settlements, 
dating back from the 60’s, as they are to be found throughout the fringes 
of the city. Twenty-one such schools were built by the city under the 
mayoralty of Marta Suplicy who was affiliated with Lula da Silva Worker’s 
Party during his first presidency, 2003-2010. Since then another twenty-
five schools-cum-community centers have been built under the rubric of 
Centros Educacionais Unificados (EN: Unified Educational Centers) or 
CEUs.  These large complexes incorporate a wide range of supplementary 
social services including theatres, cinemas, sports facilities, nursery 
schools, kindergartens, vocational high schools, dance halls, swimming 
pools, clinics, etc. CEUs were also conceived as accommodating university 
extension courses which would be coordinated by the Federal Government. 
Largely designed by the architect’s department of municipality under the 
leadership of Alexandre Delijacov, André Takia and Wanderley Ariza, these 
educational complexes now distributed throughout the periphery of the 
city constitute potential “spaces of appearance” in a political sense.  

All of this incorporates, in so many respects, the essence of Paulista 
architectural culture-politics made manifest throughout the conurbation, 
notwithstanding the traumatic political changes to which Brazil has been 
subjected over the past seven decades. In this regard it is significant when 
it comes to the megalopolitan proliferation of free-standing objects it is 
significant that Mendes da Rocha invariably worked at two different scales; 
on the one hand, at the scale of microcosmic intervention, such as his Poupa 
Tempo building or his Arc of the Patriarch of 2007 and, on the other, at the 
continental scale of the territory at large. A measure of this was evoked by 
Mendes da Rocha in his 1980 proposal for the regularization of the Bay of 
Montevideo in Uruguay of which he wrote:

The straightened lengths of the bay front are focused on the water, and 
provide new recreation areas in the form of gardens, plazas, theatres, 
cinemas, cafes, restaurants. Transformed into a city square on water, 
3 km across between Cerrito Hill and the harbor and lying between 
different city districts and centers, the bay bustles with light passenger 
traffic and makes a lively and sophisticated impression. At a remote 



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and delightfully situated point in the bay a tiny 
island was transformed into a theatre, after the 
manner of the Venetians. Perhaps one night an 
inexpressibly haunting melody from its shores 
will linger over the city.  Who knows it would be 
even like Villa-Lobos’s, Floresta do Amazonas.13

However improbable and costly such a modification 
would have been, it would have afforded a new 
territorial datum capable of unifying the placeless 
megalopolis surrounding the Bay of Montevideo 
throughout its perimeter. It is of the utmost 
importance that the architect should have conceived 
of his intervention in terms of giving rise to auditoria 
and their attendant “spaces of appearance” without 
which architecture, as the most material of the arts, 
has no socio-political cultural significance.

Endnotes
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Second 

Edition), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
1998 [1958]), 173-174.

2. Ibid., 199-200.
3. Ibid., 125,126.
4. Ibid., 322, 323.
5. Shmuel Lederman, Hannah Arendt and 

Participatory Democracy. A Peoples Utopia (Cham, 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 185.

6. Ibid., 200.
7. Andres Lepak and Daniel Talesnik, Access for All. 

São Paulo’s Architectural Infrastructures (Zurich: 
Park Books, 2019), 189.  

8. Lepak and Talesnik, Access for All, 193.
9. Annette Spiro, Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Works 

and Projects (Zurich:  Niggli, 2002), 27.
10. Rosa Artigas, Paulo Mendez da Rocha, 50 years, 

(New York: Rizzoli, 2007) 24.
11. Ibid., 85.
12. Chantal Mouffe, Agnostics (London: Verso, 

2013), 53.
13. Spiro, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, 162.



Disneyland Paris (2021)



The world of the shopping mall has become a 
template for the whole world, Margaret Crawford, 
a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and 
Director of the Department of Urban Design at 
Berkeley, concluded in her 1992 contribution to 
Variations on a Theme Park.1 The book, edited by 
the architect Michael Sorkin, offers a collection of 
alarming articles, investigating how commercial 
interests, economic principles, and consumerist 
perspectives shape contemporary cities. Sorkin 
presents it apocalyptically: ‘the end of public space.’ 
As he announces in his introduction: this is an 
alarming perspective, as public space is directly 
related to the issue of democracy, the interaction, the 
possibility of protests, the proximity of otherness, 
the existence of fringes.2 Crawford’s opening article 
examines the development and features of malls and 
mall life. Her concluding argument is made up out 
of the observation that also existing cities and their 
downtowns, even such classical and medieval cities 
as Florence and Rouen, as well as public or cultural 
venues, like museums, transform according to mall 
logics. The conclusion fits well in the book, as it 
underlines the narrative of loss. What if the whole 
world transforms along the lines of mall principles? 

Crawford is amongst the rare thinkers that 
are able to publicly rethink and criticize the own 
conclusions. A few years after her contribution to 
Variations on a Theme Park, she published an article 
in the Journal of Architectural Education wherein 
she clearly distances herself from the narrative of 
loss which had influenced her work previously. In 
“Contesting the Public Realm: Struggles over Public 
Space in Los Angeles” she writes that this idea of 

A Site of Struggle. 
AN Interview with 
Margaret Crawford

Hans Teerds



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loss is “derived from extremely narrow and normative definitions of both 
public and space,” while, “the meaning of concepts such as public, space, 
democracy, and citizenship are continually being redefined in practice 
through lived experience.”3 In the article she not only propels to approach 
consumerist spaces less pessimistically, but also writes about other practices 
of consumption less defined by the principles of capitalism, and closer 
to an everyday occupation of public life, such as street vending. This 
perspective she makes even more clear in the important book Everyday 
Urbanism, which she edited together with John Chase and John Kaliski.4  
Her own contribution to this book, the article “Blurring the Boundaries,” 
underlines how everyday spaces are still spaces of struggle, occupation, 
adaptation, and appropriation.5 As such these spaces still raise important 
political questions about both citizenship and economic participation. 
This perspective thus is much more optimistic about the vitality of public 
space as stage of the political dimension of the world. From “Contesting 
the Public Realm” onwards, the work of Crawford is clearly based on new 
insight, a new perception of the world which is more hopeful and less 
pessimistic. In this the following interview, I questioned Crawford on 
this moment of change in her thinking: how does she look back on her 
contribution to Variations on a Theme Park, why did she change her mind, 
and how does she read the situation of public space today?  

MC: The tone of my original article was hugely influenced by Michael 
Sorkin. When I was asked to contribute, the working title of the book was 
Variations on a Theme Park: Scenes From the New American City. This was a 
very non-judgmental title, a survey of what was happening in the American 
urban landscape. Later, the subtitle was changed to The End of Public 
Space, a title that did not sit well with me. However, Michael encouraged 
every contributor to have a pessimistic and even a slightly apocalyptic take 
on what we were investigating. There were two important philosophers 
who were influencing the debate at the time: Jean Baudrillard, with his 
concept of hyperreality, and Jürgen Habermas, with his idea of the loss of 
the public sphere. 

In the article I contributed to the volume, public space does not play 
an important part. The real contribution of that article to contemporary 
discourse is the discussion of the financing and organization of mall 
development.

While preparing the article, I went to many shopping malls, pretty 
much nonstop, for several months. It was at the high point of shopping 
mall development in the United States and Canada, the early nineties 
were a prosperous decade of consumption in the US. Visiting all these 



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malls definitely shaped my perception, as well as 
my conclusion that the mall had conquered the 
entire world. Once you get engaged in this narrative 
of loss, you don’t see signs that something else is 
happening. Lots of changes were lurking slightly 
under the surface, and I didn’t see them. But what I 
recognized in that narrative is that the mall concept, 
in which scripting and theming played an important 
role, was also expanding beyond the mall, to other 
domains of commercial and cultural life. Scripting 
and theming, for instance, became part of the 
design of museums and airports too. 

The concern about these mechanisms applied to 
public space and cultural venues is a concern about 
authenticity and authentic experiences. But once 
you start thinking about what is real and what is 
fantasy, the entire concept of authenticity vanishes. 
It is actually a moral response, an upper-middle-class 
concern that they used to differentiate themselves as 
informed and aware people who don’t go to malls 
and spurn Disneyland, from the rest of the populace, 
who enjoy them. It is an apparently leftist critique 
that actually serves to maintain class distinctions. I 
now read my contribution to Variations on a Theme 
Park as a response to a particular moment in time, 
influenced by a particular kind of leftist alarm, a 
moral panic about what was going on in the built 
environment. It was written in an ambience linked 
to inexorable narratives of consumerism, exploding 
marketing and a constantly expanding capitalism. 
In this situation, it is assumed that there is nothing 
you can do, except write critical articles.

But soon after my article, the circumstances 
changed. Slowly but slightly, still continuing until 
today, many malls have become obsolete and have 
been demolished. New malls are rarely being built. 
Over the past decade, this change has certainly been 
propelled with the increase of online shopping. 
However, this trend also has led to a paradoxical 
new appreciation of the mall, because many people 
now go to malls more for public interaction rather 

    THE ACTUAL 
MEANING OF THE 

RELATIONSHIP 
BETWEEN 

CONSUMPTION 
AND PUBLIC 

LIFE SEEMS TO 
BE CHANGING 

DRAMATICALLY.

“

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than to actually buy something. Physical shopping can be understood as a 
positive force shaping public space, as compared to online shopping from 
home. So, the actual meaning of the relationship between consumption 
and public life seems to be changing dramatically. But this does not mean 
that I am less concerned about the privatization of public space. There are 
still urban spaces being developed and built where commerce dominates 
public space. Take for instance the Hudson Yards in New York, or in 
Los Angeles, The Americana at Brand, which are, I would argue, a new 
typology of shopping mall: open air shopping spaces with housing above 
the shops. It differs from historic downtown districts or the medieval 
centers of cities in Europe, where people also lived (and still live) above 
shops in shopping streets. But where these streets are part and parcel of 
a continuous urban public space, the urban fabric, these new spaces are 
detached from the surrounding urban spaces. As such, these spaces still 
follow the mall typology. The residents of the apartments thus are really 
living within the confines of the shopping mall. Their public space is totally 
commercialized. How do they experience these spaces, I wonder? Do they 
accept it as their own town square? This new typology does show that 
privatization has not stopped at all. In fact, Hudson Yards is an extreme 
example of privatization.      

HT: This example of the new mall typology shows that the concern about 
the totalizing impact of commercialization on public space is still valid and 
urgent. Nevertheless, you also maintain that the mall can actually provide 
a public space, which is meaningful for particular groups in society. How 
did you change your view upon malls? And how did that also urge you 
to examine public life and commercial activities in actual streets, outside 
malls?

MC: There were several reasons. One was a critique of my mall article by 
philosopher Marshall Berman. He simply said: ‘she’s never been shopping.’ 
That was not true at all! As I visited malls for professional reasons, I also 
enjoyed them as a shopper. Every time I went to a mall, I came out with a 
bag in my hand. Berman’s critique showed me that my allegedly objective 
analysis actually discounted my own experience in malls. This led me to 
think more about different mall experiences. I also read feminist political 
philosophers, such as Nancy Fraser. Her critique of Habermas’s idea of 
the public sphere emphasizes the existence of multiple publics and the 
impossibility of a single all-embracing ‘public.’6 This leads to the idea that 
there is no universal public space, but many publics and many spaces. I 
realized that malls are different for different groups. Some offer a safe space 
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Security and safety are issues of great concern to 
these groups. The universal, male-oriented concept 
of public space that is the dominant perspective in 
Variations on a Theme Park, overlooks and dismisses 
this important dimension of malls. 

It also became clear to me that that mall-life 
cannot be reduced to just consuming. Malls offer 
many different types of publicness. I understood 
that part of the problem with my previous reading 
of mall life was the very modernist dichotomy or 
binary between public and private. But there are 
many gradations of publicness and privateness. If 
you accept this spectrum, you start to see how the 
mall provides a quasi-public space. It has dimensions 
of publicness, as well as of privateness. The moment 
you accept the mall as quasi-public space, you can 
also start to recognize similar quasi-public spaces 
in the city, outside the mall. Right across the street 
from my house in Hollywood at the time, there 
were people putting rugs on chain link fences and 
selling them to drivers passing by. This was a very 
different kind of commerce. It demonstrated very 
clearly that public space had not ended at all. The 
problem was too narrow definitions of both public 
and space.  

In the meantime, I also started to read French 
philosophers and theorists, like Henri Lefebvre, 
with his formulation of ‘the right to the city’. He 
believed that ‘everyday life’ was a crucial lens for 
understanding society. My reading of his work was 
extremely selective, emphasizing only the positive 
part and ignoring the rest. But what I saw out there 
in the city of Los Angeles was an amazing array of 
everyday practices. Immigrants would take over 
an empty parking lot after people went home at 
night, set out tables with checkered tablecloths to 
serve food like it was their home. I saw how these 
practices were also political struggles. For example, 
the day laborers, who stand on the street outside 
Home Depot and Brico stores. These laborers, mostly 
Mexican and Central American immigrants, wait 

    THERE ARE 
MANY GRADATIONS 

OF PUBLICNESS 
AND PRIVATENESS. 

IF YOU ACCEPT 
THIS SPECTRUM, 

YOU START TO SEE 
HOW THE MALL 

PROVIDES A QUASI-
PUBLIC SPACE.

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there to be picked up for work. Home Depot tried to get rid of them, but 
due to an enormous organizing effort, the jornaleros acquired the right to 
be there. They carried signs stating ‘The right to work is a human right.’ 
The stores even had to provide bathrooms and other services for them. For 
me, this was extremely positive: it showed me that human agency is still 
possible, and that there are many different politics of public space. 

At the same time, although there were street vendors everywhere, street 
vending was still illegal. For the vendors, this meant a constant threat that 
the police could easily shut them down and take their goods. Only two 
years ago, due to an enormous political effort and organization, which took 
30 years, they finally acquired the right to street vending in Los Angeles! 

HT: How do you understand this political struggle over the right to street 
vending with regard to the issue of public space? 

MC:  This, for me, is a clear example of what you can call ‘the right to 
public space’. This right must include, for me, the right to use public space 
as an economic space. This goes from the panhandler, who is conducting 
an economic transaction, to the day laborers standing on the street and 
selling their labor to vendors. I therefore would describe public space not 
as a static entity. It is a continuous struggle between different publics and 

groups, different practices and occupations. This is not something to erase, 
but rather something to embrace. 

Lately, I have been doing research in China on public space as well. In 
this totally different context, I recognize the same struggles as in the U.S. 
I focused on the unique condition of villages in the Pearl River Delta. 
These villages are very interesting because they are a bounded urban 

Black lives matter plaza, Washington DC (2020)



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type regulated by the government. This condition 
originates from land rights that Mao gave rural 
villages. As a result, the inhabitants of these villages 
are the only people in China who can elect their 
own village leaders and who can build their own 
houses. They are the only people who can create 
and control their physical space, although within 
certain limits. These residents thus have a surprising 
amount of agency. 

As you can imagine, this situation results in 
a contested condition. In these villages, you see a 
continuous struggle between the government and 
the people. The government is trying to control 
the villages and their residents, and impose very 
stringent regulations on public space. But the people 
are endlessly inventive in trying to get around those 
regulations. The kind of interaction between control 
and evasion of control is fascinating. 

HT: What are the important struggles over public 
space today in the United States?

MC:  Most important is the struggle to be different in 
public. A concentrated group of African Americans 
or Latinos in public space is perceived as a threat, 
while a gathering of white people is celebrated. Take 
for instance the case of a park in Oakland around 
Lake Merritt. It has become very controversial 
because numbers of African Americans assembled 
there to barbecue. In a notorious case, a white 
woman called in to complain that black people were 
barbecuing. It became a very heated environment, 
as more and more African Americans purposefully 
came there to claim the space. The situation went 
on for several months until the city shut it down. 
Such struggles are going on everywhere, all the time. 

But this particular struggle has changed in an even 
more dramatic way in the past decade. Some groups 
in our society are denied the right to be in public 
space, as the killing of Trayvon Martin, George 
Floyd and many other Black people demonstrates. 
To be in the street as an African American means 

    THE RIGHT TO 
PUBLIC SPACE 

MUST INCLUDE 
THE RIGHT TO USE 

PUBLIC SPACE 
AS AN ECONOMIC 

SPACE. 

“

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risking your life. That is the largest challenge to public space in the United 
States. It is literally a life-or-death issue. African American men, but also 
women, have not achieved the right to public space, even though the 
state guarantees it legally. Therefore, I consider the Black Lives Matter 
movement, to be the most important public space developments in the 
last 10 years.

HT: How does these struggles over public space and societal injustices 
relate to other pressing urban developments, the change of cities through 
suburbanization, gentrification and segregation?

MC: Many of these struggles and killings take place in suburban 
environments or on the highway. Trayvon Martin was killed in Stanford, 
Florida, in a suburban gated community. Michael Brown was killed 
in Fergusson, Missouri, also a suburb. Many central cities have been 
emptied out of African Americans and Latinos, from places that we 
might call ghettos, to better housing conditions in suburban locations. 
Simultaneously, central cities have become largely places for wealthier 
white people. The central city is no longer the central site of struggle over 
public space. It has become a more exclusive, controlled, and surveilled 
space. Instead, struggles over public space can happen anywhere, in any 
part of the city or outside it.  

HT: Architecture is often understood as an instrument to mediate 
between different, conflicting and opposing interests. But if public space 
is, essentially, a space characterized by struggle, mediating seems not to be 

LaFayette Square Park, Oakland CA, Walter Hood, landscape architect (1999)



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the proper intervention. How do you understand 
the agency of architecture with respect to public 
space? 

MC: That is an interesting question. One of the 
goals of Everyday Urbanism was to point out the 
physical qualities of public space, and ways of 
understanding time and space that could actually 
be useful for designers. My two co-editors, John 
Cage and John Kaliski, were both professional 
urban designers, and they really wanted to link our 
findings to practice. We formulated what was later 
borrowed by “tactical urbanism”—the idea that 
time is as important as space. Things can happen in 
one place at a certain time. But this does not mean 
that it recurs. My own contribution to the book 
focused on the physical and experiential qualities of 
domesticity found in many everyday spaces in Los 
Angeles. The qualities of ordinary materials, their 
softness, ornamentation, and human scale can all 
contribute to a sense of domesticity in public. This 
often happens as vendors offer food in homelike 
settings. In such moments the quality of materials 
and creative practices support one another, all ideas 
that designers can use to design public spaces. This 
is obviously a completely different approach than 
the designs and theories of someone like Jan Gehl, 
who, to me, represents what I would call ‘feel good 
white person urbanism.’

HT: What do you mean by ‘white person urbanism’?  
MC: Gehl designs the same Copenhagen public 

spaces all over the world, with the same bicycle 
paths, sidewalk cafes, and pedestrianized streets. He 
never takes on the issues that are really at stake, such 
as rights, exclusion or street livelihoods. Instead, 
his designs deal with highly conventional notions 
of public space as simply pleasurable, satisfying a 
universal public. Along with organizations such as 
the Project for Public Space, who are also allegedly 
devoted to public space, he neglects the most 
serious issues of public space. They approach public 

    AFRICAN 
AMERICAN MEN, 

BUT ALSO WOMEN, 
HAVE NOT 

ACHIEVED THE 
RIGHT TO PUBLIC 

SPACE, EVEN 
THOUGH THE STATE 

GUARANTEES IT 
LEGALLY. 

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space from a highly generic professional perspective. Another professional 
approach might be architects working for a municipality. These designers 
face other difficulties, with competing demands from different groups of 
citizens. However, since the municipal architects are very familiar with the 
places and the publics where they work, they can potentially create new 

and distinctive public spaces in diverse circumstances. This depends on the 
designer avoiding already codified ideas and principles, and understanding 
the users and their concerns.  

My colleague at Berkeley, Walter Hood, who is a landscape architect, 
only starts designing parks after carefully observing the neighborhood, 
aiming to understand what is going on. For an assignment redesigning a 
park in Oakland, he observed that the existing park was used by older men, 
who stayed during the day and drank together. He decided not to edit that 
out in his park design. Architects, I would argue, necessarily need a similar 
attentiveness to existing use, to the publics that are already there. But at 
the same time, you also have to understand that these uses and publics 
change over time. Time is a very important dimension of space. Designers 
also need to be pay attention to circumstances. Their designs need to be 
conditional and circumstantial, and to leave room for occupation and 
improvisation. Most parks in the United States usually have an incredible 
list of the things you can’t do there, and drinking is usually at the top of 
it. Such lists question the very publicness of these spaces. Is this space 
really public? No! But ultimate publicness does not exist. There are always 
different kinds of exclusions and restrictions. Paradoxically, some private 

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spaces are more public than are formal public (in 
the sense of being owned by the state) spaces. But 
is this what we mean when we discuss public space? 
Should it be ‘state-owned’? Or does ‘public’ mean: 
accommodating groups of publics? I would argue 
that to pin the idea of public space down to particular 
circumstances is a slippery idea. A fixed definition 
would deny the various struggles over public space, 
the changing publics, and the assertion of different 
kinds of rights over the space. All these instances are 
related to the specificity of the location of a park or 
square, and what publics make use of it. Who owns 
the space, who can appropriate it, and who has a 
say? These are the questions to be understood and 
addressed. 

However, coming back to your question on 
what architecture can do, it is hard for designers 
to mediate between the claims of different publics. 
I would argue that they should not aim to please 
everybody. For me, that means acknowledging 
the issue of struggle. Public space is an incredibly 
complicated issue, since it is constantly changing 
and contested. My goal in teaching has been to 
sensitize architects to these challenges, to observe, 
to understand who is using these spaces, and what 
they are doing. Public spaces are meant for particular 
publics. Nevertheless, we cannot choreograph how 
and if this public adopts the space. That is up to the 
public itself. But one of the problems we have in 
the United States is that architecture is largely a very 
un-diverse profession. Walter Hood and many other 
designers are starting to rethink what public space 
design can be. Their projects, in the era of Black 
Lives Matter, are reshaping the design profession’s 
approach to designed public space. So public space 
has not ended at all! It is always renewing itself, and 
will continue to do so in the future.

Endnotes
1.  Margaret Crawford, ‘The World in a Shopping 

Mall’, in: Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a 



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Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space (New 
York: Hill and Wang, 1992).

2. Michael Sorkin, ‘Introduction’, in: Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations 
on a Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space 
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), XV.

3. Margaret Crawford, ‘Contesting the Public Realm: Struggles over 
Public Space in Los Angeles’, in: Journal of Architectural Education, 
Vol. 49, No. 1 (Sep., 1995), 4.

4. John Chase, Margeret Crawford, John Kaliski (eds.), Everyday 
Urbanism (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999).

5. A clear instance of the political dimension was shown in the Rodney 
King Riots in Los Angeles, which happened shortly after the 
publication of Variations of a Theme Park in 1992. Margaret Crawford, 
‘Blurring the Boundaries. Public Space and Private Life’, in: John 
Chase, Margeret Crawford, John Kaliski (eds.), Everyday Urbanism 
(New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999), 28.

6. See for instance Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A 
Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in: 
Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere. (Cambridge 
Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).



Introduction.  Why a right to the city? 
Before there were cities, it is hardly likely that 

anyone ever expressed the thought that they have a 
right to one; and in the roughly six-thousand-year 
history of urban environments, no such idea of a 
right to the city was formulated until the French 
Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre proposed just 
this, in 1968.  And when Lefebvre did so, this was 
in energetic but rather vague fashion, as much a 
rallying cry for the disaffected and marginalized as 
the expression of a clear-cut moral or legal concept 
on which to base detailed social design or change.  
Vague or not, Lefebvre’s proposal found great 
favor among urban planners, international civil 
servants, public advocates, and others—somewhat 
independent of political or economic bent.  What is 
the attraction—why do some believe that there is a 
right to the city?

In what follows, I sketch a version of the right 
to the city (RTTC) that I take to be (a) feasible, (b) 
generic, and so (c) broadly amenable to many of 
its adherents; further, I suggest how it is that this 
entails special sorts of responsibilities or obligations 
for architects and others tending to our built 
environment and the spaces—especially public 
space—so structured and defined. Along the 
way, I provide a brief account of some historical 
motivations for embracing the right to the city, as 
well as reasons for endorsing my generic account.  
For the moment, I offer the quick suggestion that 
typical reasons for supporting a right to the city 
are grounded in traditional rights considerations: 
for one, benefits of urban life point to a positive 

Architectural Responsibilities 
and the Right to a City

Saul Fisher



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right, along the lines of an entitlement; and for another, dangers and 
impediments to life—and quality of life—in the city point to a negative 
right, along the lines of freedoms from harm and liberties to voluntary 
engagements.  How all this has a particularly urban focus and character, 
and how such a right or rights translate into specifically architectural 
responsibilities, depends at least in part on the sorts of things cities are and 
how they are constituted, or so I will argue. I begin, though, with a set of 
ground rules for any putative right to the city, basic principles as such one 
should uphold and not violate.

 1. Right to the city: initial parameters, historical background, and a proposal
a. Assumptions.
I start with a small set of parametric assumptions about what a right to 

the city should look like, which thereby provide ground rules for crafting 
such a right.  I take these assumptions as more or less self-evident or, at 
least, as relatively obvious candidate parameters.   

THE GOOD OR THE BEST CITY.  First, the right to the city is a right 
to a particular range of possible cities with desirable or requisite 
characteristics.  A right to a city which guaranteed no more than an 
urban hellscape would be useless, cynical ‘right.’ Note that this suggests 
that RTTC is, broadly speaking, an entitlement or claims right, where the 
positive good is a city that, for those with the rights to it—presumably 
its citizens—is in the balance a place more good than bad to live and 
work in.  A further variation in this direction is to posit a RTTC that 
guarantees the best possible version of whatever city to which the right 
pertains.1

COMMUNAL. Second, RTTC is a community-focused, publicly 
oriented right, which individuals hold but as pertains to their current 
or prospective group membership qua urban citizens.2 It’s unclear that 
hermits, survivalists, rural dwellers, and exurbanites have RTTC; and 
the case of suburbanites is marginal, an intriguing case given their 
symbiotic relationship with the city.3 In short, RTTC is a right attaching 
to people who live in cities, hence live together in densely-populated 
communities. Given a communal orientation, RTTC should likely reflect 
historical, heritage, cultural and emotional motivations and stakes of 
the groups in question, with corresponding entitlements. As I argue, 
however, positing group claims rights does not entail all and only group 
obligations; further, the optimal way to meet such claims may not be in 
the aggregate, that is, not by the city as a whole entity but through the 
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FUTURE-FACING. Third, RTTC is forward-
looking. Any rights such as we claim are not 
necessarily—and not limited to—the city as it 
exists now, but as it will exist in the future.  This 
is partly a function of the imperfections of cities 
and a RTTC claim on the best possible city.  But it’s 
also a reflection of the city’s dynamic character—
its shifting and growing over time, and becoming 
more and less accessible, more and less capable 
of housing or otherwise serving its citizens, more 
and less well arranged to promote the good life.

Taken together, these parameters tell us that a 
RTTC should provide those with greatest investment 
in the city—the citizens—with guarantees to 
ongoing improvements and enhancements of 
goods and engagements, as well as amelioration 
or elimination of harms, such that quality of life 
progresses rather than stagnates or declines, so that 
an urban life is a worthy and rewarding one.

b. The Lefebvre Construal and Alternate Takes
Looking at actual, historical articulations of a 

RTTC—from Lefebvre onward—we see some degree 
of conformity with these parameters, at least in 
spirit, and if only in one or another fractional form.  
Lefebvre, for his part, while initially giving us RTTC, 
may not be its best proponent. First, as Loren King 
and others have noted, his Marxism makes for poor 
rights advocacy.5 The classic Marxist sees rights as a 
frivolity of bourgeois democratic politics, detached 
from realities of material goods distributed and 
controlled by the capital class. Second, and more 
compellingly for the non-Marxist, he does not 
say that in which a RTTC consists nor, as Attoh 
notes, how it would work out in practice.6 It’s not 
surprising that, on a Marxist reading, we aren’t told 
about particular entitlements or liberties. At all 
events, we are left with the question of what, quite, 
this is a right to. Nor are we told who has these 
rights, though it is fair to assume that, for Lefebvre, 

    LEFEBVRE, 
FOR HIS PART, 

WHILE INITIALLY 
GIVING US THE 

RIGHT TO THE CITY, 
MAY NOT BE 

ITS BEST 
PROPONENT. 

“

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this is primarily interesting as a right insofar as it represents an unfulfilled 
commitment to the dispossessed and the working class. One thing Lefebvre 
does tell us, on the other hand, is that those who have RTTC have it because 
they are participants in construction of the city as an urban project of 
living and working together.7 This is a crucial observation for just about 
any version of an RTTC as it highlights the reasons that cities came into 
being and continue to grow as the dominant form of human settlement:  
cities exist for the advancement of material and cultural wellbeing. His 
point is that intentionally and intensely concentrating populations in the 
same places—namely, cities—introduces claims on how people should live 
and prosper in those contexts.  

Of course, not all is well in the city.  Another thing Lefebvre tells us—
following his Marxist-style analysis—is that while citizens build the city 
and gain the benefits of living in the urban environment, they are also 
exploited by the capital class in so doing and are alienated from the city 
though it is their own project.8 Accordingly, RTTC for Lefebvre consists 
in a right for urban citizens to direct life in the city as engaged with, and 
unalienated from, their urban environment.9  With these few and imprecise 
notions, there is much room for interpretation and variation.  For example, 
we might direct or shape life in a city so as to not be alienating through 
direct behavioral interventions like rules, laws, intentional cultural shifts, 
and the like—but alternatively we might think it more effective to deploy 
environmental interventions as crafted in architectural and planning 
design.

Two broad traditions have taken up the Lefebvrian RTTC, also focusing 
on the city as the increasingly principal context of human settlement and 
the greatest source of wealth, creativity, power, as well as other human 

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phenomena, productions, and endeavors.10 For one, 
Marxists have tended to extrapolate from or build on 
Lefebvre’s view within their set of conventions, for 
example, by explaining the role of surplus value in 
urban productivity and positing the RTTC as a right 
to that value and its management.11 For another, 
a range of urban planners, geographers, political 
activists, and others have articulated more specific 
rights as they take to realize a vision of eliminating, 
punishing and disenfranchising injustices, such as 
Lefebvre associated with alienation and exploitation 
in the city or by its capital class. Examples of 
such specific rights include rights to housing, 
transportation, communications, participatory 
decision-making, participatory urban design, and 
protection from harms (e.g., excessive state force). 
While stimulated by Lefebvre’s critique, however, 
these latter views generally assume neither diagnoses 
nor solutions along Marxist lines. As with the 
Lefebvrian proposal, the latter, non-Marxist views 
stay within the lines of the parametric assumptions 
laid out here, motivated by a goal-state, sensitive to 
the dynamism of the city, and communally oriented.  
Yet they also move beyond Lefebvre, in concretely 
specifying goods, services, liberties, or freedoms to 
which citizens have a right qua citizens.

c. A Generic Proposal.
A third approach is to craft a generic RTTC that, 

while also inspired by Lefebvre, is not wedded to his 
framework, to Marxist tenets, or to any of the specific 
entitlement or liberty-oriented rights in particular 
as may also be inspired by that framework. To this 
end, consider a traditional view of rights (following, 
e.g., Hohfeld)12 as comprises the positive and the 
negative, emphasizing claims on entitlements on 
one hand and ensuring maintenance of liberty and 
protection from harm on the other.  A more recent 
addition to this array in the rights literature has 
it that, in addition to attending to concerns of or 
for individuals, a complete range of rights reflects 

    THE RIGHT 
TO THE CITY 

FOR LEFEBVRE 
CONSISTS IN A 

RIGHT FOR URBAN 
CITIZENS TO DIRECT 

LIFE IN THE CITY 
AS ENGAGED WITH, 
AND UNALIENATED 

FROM, THEIR URBAN 
ENVIRONMENT. 

“

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concerns of or for communities as aggregate parties.  Along these lines, and 
in pursuit of a maximalist right to the city, we would likely want that right 
to comprise constituent sub-rights as advance claims, meet communitarian 
concerns, and guarantee liberties.13  

I propose that this basic taxonomy points to an umbrella conception of 
a right to the city that includes at least these basic sub-rights:  urban access, 
as entitlement claim; urban inclusion, as community right; and urban 
flourishing, as a liberties-assuring and freedom-from-harms right. A full-
blown defense of these sub-rights is beyond the present scope; here I note a 
few definitional points and take note of one common denominator relative 
to urban public space. First, access is particularly suitable as a fundamental 
entitlement or claims right in the urban context because the city’s density 
and intensity is not only a positive economically and culturally but a 
negative as well, building and accelerating scarcity of resources—be they 
necessary or merely desirable. Insofar as scarcity is managed by reference 
to moral or justice considerations, we want a right to access the city’s 
resources as a guarantee of moral or just distribution, for example, to 
protect those least likely to secure access otherwise. Second, inclusion is 
suitable as a community right in the urban context because the purpose 
of cities, at root, is to bring people together for commerce and culture—

such that marginalizing and excluding people is antithetical to the core 
urban goals. Hence we want a right that serves to guarantee that, even 
if living in distinctive communities for solidarity purposes,14 all citizens 
are included in the broader urban community to the extent that they 
choose or as is otherwise socially optimal. Much more may be said about 
what inclusion entails here. Suffice it to mention, in this context, various 

Police Raid in Grigny, quartier de la Grande Borne (2016). 



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forms of openness, availability, and welcoming as 
comprise but are not limited to: involvement in 
decision-making of import to the urban whole 
or significant parts thereof; participation in and 
consumption of the urban host culture and other 
constituent cultures; access to economic and social 
opportunities of the city; and engagement with 
infrastructure and networks of the city. And as a 
third sub-right, flourishing is suitable as a liberties-
assuring and freedom-from-harms right in the 
urban context because the city only flourishes—
e.g., economically, socially, culturally—when its 
citizens can flourish. This in turn requires a negative 
right or rights of individuals and communities to 
enjoy protection from harms and liberties to act in 
ways that promote thriving and success, as well as 
a positive right to such entitlements as are accorded 
to city dwellers and promote citizen success and 
thriving.15 

It merits noting that, as a common denominator, 
all these sub-rights point to, and may be exploited 
to sustain, the broad claim of the urban dweller 
on public space.  For example, city dwellers have a 
right to access public space, as a scarce commodity 
more typically contracted than expanded by urban 
development; city dwellers may only realize a right 
to urban inclusion if there is sufficient and fitting 
public space in which to freely commune; and 
the city and its dwellers can only truly flourish—
optimize their thriving and success—where citizens 
may pursue work, study, and leisure beyond their 
own private spaces—free from the limits of solitude 
and constraints on personal room to move and 
share, e.g., ideas, innovation, or culture.  This 
picture is consonant with at least one prominent 
RTTC view that takes city-wise rights to primarily 
consist in rights to public space.16

To be sure, this is a very general account of only 
three possible sub-rights of a RTTC. Others might be 
articulated; these have the merit of accounting for a 
broad range of urban life. To see this, as well as how 



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these rights may be engaged, it’s helpful to consider cases where they are 
not, that is, where the rights are not recognized or else are recognized but 
infringed. Thus, we have:

DEVELOPER. Rita, a major developer in a major city, is planning a 
giant housing and commercial development of a large area of the city 
heretofore left in a state of disrepair and disuse. Elected officials have 
given carte blanche to Rita to develop the site however they see fit. The 
public has been left out of any semblance of a decision-making process. 
Operative RTTC sub-rights here concern inclusion and community.

STREET GANG. A new, violent STREET GANG menaces a previously 
prosperous area, and the residents are afraid to leave their houses. Police 
and social workers are ineffective and, while the gang grows in popularity 
and financial success, the neighborhood loses its vibrant street life and 
spirals downward as a desirable place to live. The operative RTTC sub-
right here, as highlighted by their violation or neglect, pertains to 
flourishing. Note, however, that in STREET GANG, the scenario need not 
have been located in a city; the setting could have been suburban or 
even rural. We can fix this in the following scenario:

PUBLIC HOUSING GANG. As in STREET GANG, public security in the 
area deteriorates. Unlike the generic location in STREET GANG, though, 
this scenario is specifically set in urban public housing, where the 
density of population heightens the probability of criminality, and 
the deteriorating security environment induces social, economic, and 
psychological depression. Operative RTTC sub-rights here are related to 
flourishing, specifically in urban contexts.

MÉTRO. Jean-Marie waits at a métro station for a train that never 
arrives. Unbeknownst to him, the city has discontinued that train line 
and is preparing to demolish the station shortly.  Henceforth Jean-Marie 
will need to walk to work, 7 km away. The operative RTTC sub-right 
here concerns entitlement, specifically to affordable and convenient 
mass transit service in a modern city.

These cases give a small taste of the diversity of scenarios where quality 
of life, integration and inclusion, and just benefits of city life—all as 
particular to urban contexts—are degraded for some parties X because of 
the actions or inactions of other parties Y. (In addition to these negative 
scenarios, other sorts of scenarios will highlight a positive picture, wherein 
RTTC-type rights are realized or sustained; see Appendix A.) Two points 
merit our attention in all these cases. For one, such cases arise in specifically 
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together—which, as we have noted, is largely due 
to density and intensity of populations and their 
interactions. For another, the dereliction of Y as the 
cause of the failure to realize or sustain X’s rights 
points to Y’s responsibilities or obligations to X and 
all other citizens relative to the corresponding RTTC 

sub-rights as having not been realized or sustained 
in such cases.  In brief, as the dereliction of Y 
prevents the relevant sub-rights of X from being 
satisfied, we sense that Y is to blame, that is, to be 
held responsible.

Before moving on, let’s revisit the proposed 
parameters for a viable RTTC, namely, that such a 
right should promote the best possible city, should 
be communal in orientation, and should be future-
facing given the organic and not-so-organic change 
in the life of a city. All three sub-rights proposed 
here—to access, inclusion, and flourishing—
are contributing and perhaps necessary factors 
for optimizing the city and city life. Further, 
access and inclusion are manifestly community- 
and communally-oriented. It may be harder to 
specify that or how these particular sub-rights are 
constitutive of a future-facing RTTC, though it is 
also hard to imagine articulating or satisfying any 
future-facing RTTC that fails to build upon, or at 
least recognize, prior commitments to access, 
inclusion, and flourishing of urban dwellers.

2. Identifying and assigning responsibilities or obligations
So far, we have the picture of a broad RTTC as an 

umbrella right, comprising at least three sub-rights, 
including a right to entitlements, community, 
and flourishing. What attaches these rights to the 
city context in particular is a function of urban 
conditions, most prominently a population density 
that entails or generates problems, needs, and 
desiderata, that is, the stuff of special rights. And—
as is traditionally held relative to rights generally—
satisfaction or advancement of such RTTC sub-rights 
relies on parties having relevant responsibilities 

    ARCHITECTS 
AND THOSE 

WITH SIMILAR 
OCCUPATIONS ARE 

HIGHLY VISIBLE 
IN THIS REGARD, 

AS THEY PLAN 
AND SHAPE 

THE PHYSICAL 
AND BROADLY 
EXPERIENTIAL 

CHARACTERISTICS 
OF THE CITY. 

“

”



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or obligations. In this domain, failure to meet those responsibilities or 
obligations results in citizens failing to flourish, to attain or maintain 
community membership, or to receive such goods or services as are 
expectable in a justly ordered urban life.

Two principal tasks arise relative to talk about rights-wise responsibilities 
or obligations:  first, the what—identifying those responsibilities or 
obligations corresponding to particular rights; and second, the who—
identifying the parties with significant responsibilities or obligations 
in this regard. Both tasks represent complex questions with dizzying 
arrays of possible answers—as many as there are variables factoring into 
urban planning and design and city management, financing, servicing, 
and so on. One specific challenge in identifying and assigning RTTC-
wise responsibilities or obligations is the great diversity of urban actors 
(agents) pursuing different tasks relevant to the wide variety of sub-rights, 
in providing goods and services, promoting inclusion, or facilitating 
flourishing. Thus, politicians, bureaucrats, social services, corporate and 
small business owners, educators, health providers, public safety personnel, 
and many others populate a long list of people with such responsibilities. 

Among these professions and roles, architects and those with similar 
occupations (urban planners, urban designers, etc.)—whom I’ll refer to 
as ‘architectural agents’—are highly visible in this regard, as they plan and 
shape the physical and broadly experiential characteristics of the city.Indeed, 
there is a special moral claim on architectural agents relative to RTTC-wise 
responsibilities and obligations:  they draw the contours of possible ways 

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that citizens can organize and conduct their lives 
and work in the city, and in this way they support 
or prevent the possible pursuit of activities by all 
other agents as may contribute to the satisfaction 
of RTTC-wise responsibilities and obligations. This 
sort of meta-responsibility is additional to their 
ground-level RTTC-wise responsibilities in the urban 
context.

In this set of meta-responsibilities, however, 
architectural agents are not alone. One other family 
of actors with similar meta-responsibilities is the 
financial services industry, without whom nothing 
is possible in city life, including realization of 
architectural plans. So architects’ responsibilities 
may be outweighed by those of others with greater 
power to determine the fate of cities and popular 
rights to them. Even if not outpaced in such fashion, 
architects are clearly not the sole actors responsible 
for realization of RTTC-wise sub-rights, whether at 
the ground-level or the meta-level.

A further difficulty in assigning RTTC-wise 
responsibilities to architectural agents concerns the 
temporal. The city and its population shift over 
time, and with demographic, social, economic, and 
other shifts come changes in the identity and nature 
of those holding the right to the city, and the array 
of sub-rights to which they may justly lay claim. 
Thus it is unclear to whom architects of a given 
moment might have responsibilities—particularly 
in accounting for future population shifts—or 
how the duration of such responsibilities should be 
gauged.  

A third challenge in this regard concerns the 
appropriate degrees of RTTC-wise responsibility to 
be shouldered by architectural agents. For example, 
it cannot be fair to assign such responsibilities to 
individual architectural agents, however influential, 
relative to the entirety of a city, even if—as with 
Oscar Niemeyer and Brasilia—they have designed 
the city’s basic plans and major structures.  Nor 
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to the architectural professions in collective fashion, for we then excuse 
each architect from standard individual obligations. Neither individual 
architects nor architects in the aggregate considered as the profession overall 
can assume or be assigned the full range of such RTTC-wise responsibilities 
as we would apportion to architectural agents.

3. A compositionalist approach to city-wise rights and responsibilities.
How, then, to apportion RTTC-wise responsibilities or obligations to 

architectural agents—by what means and to what degree? My proposal 
reflects a key aspect of the aforementioned scenarios (DEVELOPER, public 
HOUSING GANG, and MÉTRO): while some such instances where rights are 
upheld or denied have a system-wide or city-wide origin or developmental 
path or set of consequences, many—perhaps most—such instances arise 
out of highly localized circumstances. In short, RTTC-related scenarios arise 
as much relative to a bus stop or a single office tower as they do relative to 
the urban water system or the city’s entire zoning code. It is those highly 
localized scenarios where architects and others with architectural agency 
have the most frequent and robust obligations relative to RTTC and its 
family of sub-rights.

To make this suggestion work, such that architects and other architectural 
agents can assume—at the micro-scale—the sorts of obligations we take 
to follow from RTTC, we need to build on two more fundamental claims. 
First, we need to show that architectural agents have a kind of efficacy 
to begin with that allows them to meaningfully contribute to realization 
or sustaining of RTTC sub-rights.  Second, we need to show that what 
architectural agents do as individuals or in small groups at the micro-scale 
rolls up to the realization or sustaining of RTTC sub-rights.

The first fundamental claim is, at root, an empirical point. In the early 
interactions between architects and environmental psychologists (1970s), 
there were worries about the feasibility of ‘architectural determinism,’ the 
view that architectural forms and the spaces they shape can have regular and 
predictable effects on behaviors of those experiencing the forms and spaces. 
While there is cause for caution as elsewhere in the behavioral sciences, a 
wealth of scientific and commercial data supports the general notion that 
our range of choices and actions may be influenced environmentally—and 
that even subtle design interventions in the built environment may shift 
behaviors.17 Insofar as realization or sustaining of RTTC sub-rights entails 
enabling, encouraging, or preventing citizens from undertaking particular 
behaviors, the empirical accounts of ‘architectural determinism’ tell us how 
architectural agents take on such responsibility.

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drawing on (1) a picture of RTTC in which our 
judgment that either the umbrella right or sub-
rights are satisfied is divisible by spatial and 
temporal regions, together with (2) a compositional 
notion of architectural objects.  First, we know that 
we can divide judgment about rights satisfaction 
by regions (spatial or temporal) given that rights 
are mostly, if not always, realized only partially 
and to varying degrees depending on location and 
timeframe. While this is typically seen as a real-world 
imperfection for any rights regime, this feature also 
allows us to think about satisfaction of rights in 
such limited domains—of a given place or a given 
time—as successes within those domains. And 
since, in the case of realizing or satisfying RTTC-wise 
sub-rights, we cannot expect architectural agents 
(whether as individuals or in the aggregate) to 
satisfy such rights—either across the whole of a city 
or for the entire duration of its existence—spatially 
and temporally modest targets are called for.

Second, in a compositional account of 
architectural objects, we have a ready instrument 
for taking apart the city along spatial or temporal 
lines—such that we can reasonably apportion 
RTTC-wise responsibilities to architectural agents 
at a level (spatially) and over a duration for which 
expectations and accountability are realistic goals. 
A compositional account of architectural objects, as 
relative to cities in particular, says that urban built 
environments are composed of built structures as 
unitary individuals or collections thereof, such 
that, as aggregates of those unitary or collective 
individuals, cities are shaped by those individuals. 
The idea is that cities, as wholes, are shaped by the 
parts they comprise.18 This is a three-dimensional, 
spatial picture, but it is trivial to expand this 
compositionalism to a fourth, temporal dimension:  
the character of cities is shaped over time by earlier 
instantiations of the urban built environment, both 
where the earlier elements of that environment 
survive, as well as where they cease to exist and 

    PUTTING THESE 
TWO ELEMENTS 
TOGETHER, WE 

CAN REASONABLY 
APPORTION 

RESPONSIBILITY TO 
ARCHITECTURAL 

AGENTS FOR RTTC-
WISE SUB-RIGHTS. 

“

”



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make way for new elements.  Compositionalism contributes to our ability 
to judge the satisfaction of RTTC-wise sub-rights by giving us a means of 
gauging whether built structures (or collections thereof ) may help to raise 
or lower satisfaction of city-wise rights within bounds—that is, on a partial 
or fractional basis.  The idea is to then ‘roll up’ (sum across) that degree 
of rights-satisfaction, by taking those structures as parts contributing to 
the city or its regions one piece at a time, creating conditions for, e.g., 
strengthening inclusion, providing just benefits attached to city life, and 
promoting flourishing.

Putting these two elements together, we can reasonably apportion 
responsibility to architectural agents for RTTC-wise sub-rights. The first 
element is recognizing that architectural agents can shape behaviors in ways 
that contribute to or detract from realization of rights special to the urban 
context, e.g., to housing or mass transit or access to cultural resources. 
The second element associates satisfaction of such given sub-rights with 
particular buildings or collections of buildings, or sets of buildings 
at a particular time. In this way, we can tie realization of rights, and 
corresponding responsibilities to that end, to particular architectural agents 
where they are actually in a position to assume such levels of responsibility. 
Further, compositionalism allows us to assemble an aggregated reading of 
architectural agents’ successes, on a city-wide basis, in furthering the RTTC 
of a given city’s citizens —as spread across different sub-rights as well as the 
component parts of the city.

4. Problems
Here are at least three prospective problems with this view. First, 

architects generally accept a range of responsibilities, of course, though 
not in an absolute sense that some advocates associate with at least some 
rights in the moral and political philosophical tradition.19 Consider, 
in this vein, city-wide and system-wide scenarios as invoke RTTC sub-
rights and recognizably feature city-wide and system-wide agents with 
corresponding obligations we might take to be absolute per their rights-
wise stipulation. For example, a RTTC sub-right to access to healthcare 
in the urban context (relative to, say, asthma prevention and mitigation 
in distressed neighborhoods) may well be recognizable as an absolute 
right—one not defeated by other considerations. On the other hand, 
for scenarios that invoke RTTC sub-rights on the local or building level, 
the responsible architectural agents are unlikely to have corresponding 
obligations in any traditionally absolute sense. Given that utility is a core 
professional and heritage-wise goal for architects, obligations are pro tanto 
in their worldview—they go only as far as they go, and can be defeated 



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for the greater good. So, there is at least a cultural 
gap here, if we think that architectural agents have 
indefeasible obligations relative to RTTC sub-rights.

Second, I have suggested here that compo-
sitionalism gives us a means of summing across 
judgments of architectural agents as satisfying (or 
not) RTTC sub-rights in given spatial or temporal 
regions, rather than tying satisfaction of rights to 
the city-wide scale alone and then unrealistically 
pinning responsibilities for such on architectural 
agents (singly or all together). But we might not 
think that we can speak meaningfully of rights-
satisfaction as the sort of thing one can sum across, 
even if we can differentially gauge levels of rights 
satisfaction across distinctive spaces and times. 
How we see this summation problem will turn, I 
suspect, on whether we think of rights regimes as 
meaningfully satisfied at all if they are fractionally 
satisfied only in this or that neighborhood, only by 
this or that built structure.  We can only sum across 
rights satisfaction for the city as a whole in this way 
if we rule out the notion that rights only satisfied 
for some populations are not satisfied universally 
hence not satisfied at all.

Finally, it may be that I have insufficiently 
demarcated responsibilities attaching to architects 
in particular—as against those attaching to other 
‘architectural agents’ such as urban designers or 
planners. These are, after all, different roles. One 
way to carve up the attendant responsibilities, 
for example, might reflect the scale of the 
corresponding design tasks.20 That said, the borders 
of architectural and urban design and planning 
disciplines are famously porous, especially in the 
domain of localized urban projects such as London’s 
Barbican Centre, New York’s Lincoln Center, or 
Paris’s La Villette. So, practice may point to a need 
for vagueness here. A more pertinent response is 
principled: the compositionalist framework I have 
drawn upon should do the work of apportioning 
responsibilities for satisfying RTTC to different sorts 



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of architectural agents in accordance with (a) the urban design element as 
distinguished possibly by scale but equally possibly by function, systemic 
role, liability, or still other factors; and (b) the attendant RTTC sub-rights as 
come into play with each such design element. Even similar ‘puzzle pieces’ 
as compose a city will likely prompt different responsibility assignments to 
different roles across, for example, urban cultures and contexts.21

5. Conclusion
I close with a brief revisit of the STREET GANG and PUBLIC HOUSING 

GANG scenarios, which taken together, I propose, highlight the character 
of architectural agent’s RTTC-wise responsibilities in the specifically urban 
context. Recall that the difference between those two scenarios is that the 
first could take place in all manner of locations, whereas the second is at 
least in part the product of a city setting, which from an environmental 
psychology perspective has gone very much awry. At issue is (a) the degree 
to which a built environment that resembles an urban rat trap for human 
beings may accelerate, worsen, and perpetuate criminal activity or other 
socially deviant behaviors by some of the local citizenry, and (b) the degree 
to which architects and planners of said environment have responsibilities 
for designing in ways so as to lessen the probabilities of such behaviors 
and their consequences. If citizens of all backgrounds and housing settings 
have rights to flourishing in the city, as entails a further right to public 
safety, then we have identified some level of responsibility for realizing 
such rights as may be apportioned to architectural agents. This is, to be 
sure, only a piece of the puzzle: others will have relevant responsibilities 
and these are just some few RTTC-wise sub-rights among many others.  But 
if we start at this level of analysis, we will be en route to identifying the 
many puzzle pieces of responsibility attached to the actions and choices of 
architects relative to the fullest range of RTTC-wise sub-rights.  That will 
give us a picture of ways that, at the micro-scale, architects and those in 
related professions contribute to realizing or thwarting realization of rights 
to the city.

Appendix A. Scenarios of rights secured and sustained.
CULTURAL FESTIVAL. A marginalized immigrant community sustains 

its cultural traditions in private homes and makeshift community 
spaces. The city invites community members to participate in the 
summer cultural festival in the park. Regular cultural programming by 
the immigrant community, open to all, ensues and the community’s 
cultural threads are further woven into the greater urban fabric. The 
operative RTTC sub-right here concerns inclusion.



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SMALL-SCALE RETAIL. The city’s produce and 
dry goods street market is thriving thanks to a 
zoning law that keeps rents low on the market 
stalls and protects the market’s contributions to 
affordable and animated city life that is at once 
dense and human-scale. The operative RTTC sub-
right here concerns flourishing.

GARBAGE. The city’s sanitation department 
fails to collect the garbage for two years due 
to inadequate landfill capacity. Quality of life 
declines rapidly as the garbage mounts, hindering 
transportation and circulation of goods and 
services.  After mass demonstrations and public 
pressures, a new landfill location is identified 
for safe disposal, and garbage collection and 
processing are resumed. The operative RTTC sub-
right here concerns entitlement.

Endnotes
1. While the best possible city could be at least more 

good than bad, the optimized good city and the 
best possible city are not necessarily equivalent. 
Beyond the present scope: which is more desirable 
may be a contextual matter, or decidable by 
logical or material considerations.

2. David Harvey argues, from one Marxist 
perspective, that RTTC is a collective right and 
not an individual right; cf. David Harvey, ‘The 
Right to the City, New Left Review 53 (2008), 
23-40.

3. Mark Purcell sees citizens’ claim on RTTC 

as grounded in their contribution to urban 
experience and urban space; if so, the suburban 
claim is strengthened; cf. Mark Purcell, 
‘Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and 
its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant,’ GeoJournal 
58 (2002): 99-108.

4. Margaret Cuonzo sees RTTC in holistic, ecological 
terms—inclusive of the city and all its citizens 
at once; cf. Margaret Cuonzo, ‘The Right to the 
City and the Rights of the City.’ In Deborah 
Mutnick, Margaret Cuonzo, Carole Griffiths, 



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Timothy Leslie, Jay M. Shuttleworth (eds.), The City is an Ecosystem:  
Sustainable Education, Policy, and Practice,  (London: Routledge, 2022), 
105-115.

5. Loren King, ‘Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City.’ In Sharon M. 
Meagher, Samantha Noll, and Joseph S. Biehl (eds.), The Routledge 
Handbook of Philosophy of the City, (London: Routledge, 2019), 76-86.

6. Kafui A. Attoh, ‘What Kind of Right is the Right to the City?,’ Progress 
in Human Geography 35 (2011) 5: 669–685; cf. 674.

7. While in Marxist orthodoxy, the city is a material artifact assembled 
by its inhabitants, Lefebvre takes the city as more of an artwork than 
a mundane instrument or tool.  Cf. Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville 
(Paris: Anthropos, 1968), 54-55.

8. Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville, 108, 120-121.
9. Ibid., 120-121; Attoh, ‘What Kind of Right’, 674.
10. Some RTTC advocates focus on a right to cities in particular as opposed 

to rights to generic places (as also include rural, suburban, unsettled 
places, etc.).  I propose that cities’ density and intensity effects—e.g., on 
social, economic, cultural, and communal conditions, information and 
communication facility, and so on—demand our rights-wise attention.  
Density and intensity are core characteristics of cities that (a) brought 
them into being—ostensibly, a net positive, as well as (b) produced 
many pressing problems of urban life.

11. The locus classicus for subsequent Marxist defenses of a Lefebvrian RTTC, 
particularly in a geography tradition, is David Harvey, ‘The Right to the 
City’; cf. also David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to 
the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012). Don Mitchell focuses on 
public space, emphasizing RTTC as a means of contesting privatization 
(cf. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight 
for Public Space (London: Guilford Press, 2003), esp. 13-41). Other 
authors view the Lefebvrian right in the context of European Marxism 
of his day. Chris Butler stresses the French autogestion tradition (Chris 
Buttler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to 
the City (Abingdon, UK: Routledge-Cavendish, 2012), esp. 133-159); 
Daniel Mullis sees a continuity with the Italian operaismo refrain: 
Daniel Mullis,  ‘Prendersi la città’ (‘Recht auf die Stadt. Facetten und 
Möglichkeiten einer Parole,’ Emanzipation, 3 (2013) 2, 57-70). Jean-
Pierre Garnier offers a Marxist dissent, rejecting a Lefebvrian addressing 
ills of capitalist urbanization as prone to serving as “…alibi, wishful 
thinking, or fiction”; cf. Jean-Pierre Garnier, ‘Le droit à la ville de Henri 
Lefebvre à David Harvey. Entre théorisations et realization,’ L’Homme 
& la Société, 1 (2014) 191: 59-70.



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12. Wesley Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions 
as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, Walter Wheeler 
Cook, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1919); for an overview, cf. Leif Wenar, ‘Rights,’ 
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005); 
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights. Attoh 
(‘What Kind of Right’) suggests how the rights 
literature may ground RTTC. 

13. A distinctive model has it that a single right 
with different aspects accommodates the varied 
traditional goals of rights.

14. Defined by, e.g., ethnicity, sub-culture, age, etc.
15. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for 

highlighting the positive right entailed here.
16. See Mitchell, The Right to the City (2003). 

For further notions of public space and rights 
thereto, see Evelyn S. Ruppert, ‘Rights to Public 
Space: Regulatory Reconfigurations of Liberty’, 
Urban Geography, 27 (2006) 3: 271-292; and 
elsewhere in this issue.

17. Even as some worry about a strict determinism, 
empirical evidence mounts for enhanced 
propensities to specific behavioral, cognitive, 
or emotional responses to architectural design; 
cf. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your 
World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our 
Lives (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 
2017); and Debra Flanders Cushing and 
Evonne Miller, Creating Great Places: Evidence-
based Urban Design for Health and Wellbeing 
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

18. Saul Fisher, ‘Architecture and Philosophy of the 
City.’ In Meagher, Noll, and Biehl, The Routledge 
Handbook of Philosophy of the City, 131-142.

19. See, e.g., Russ Shafer-Landau, ‘Specifying 
Absolute Rights,’ Arizona Law Review 37 (1995): 
209-24; for a rejection of absolute rights; see, 
e.g., Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 
1990).

20. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for noting 



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this issue and suggesting a scale-based articulation of responsibilities.
21. Assigning such responsibilities to architects prompts yet other con-

cerns. Architects are almost never solely responsible for satisfying 
moral claims as attach to even fractional RTTC. Their responsibilities 
may be outweighed by those with greater power to determine the fate 
of cities—or broad, popular rights to them. Further, the temporally 
and demographically diffuse nature of rights holders—the shifting city 
populace over time—make unclear to whom architects might have 
responsibilities, or how the duration of such responsibilities should be 
gauged.  



Vittorio De Sicca’s Il Tetto (1956), an artful 
cinematographic exercise in neo-realist style, centers 
on one couple’s quest to find a home in post-war 
Rome. The second half of the film sees penniless 
Luisa and Natale plan the completion of a house 
of sorts. The city regulations allow people to secure 
their right to a parcel of land and a small building 
if they manage to construct the latter without being 
stopped by the authorities. The completion of the 
house is to be secretive and realized overnight—
the title of the movie refers to one of the features 
required for the building to be legally considered 
as completed, and thus occupiable: four walls, a 
door, and a tetto¸ a roof. At dawn, policemen find 
the newly erected shack, Luisa and Natale anxiously 
hiding within. The agents inspect it, walking 
around its perimeter. They palpate its block walls in 
a methodic way. They knock vigorously on the door, 
which they then try to open, without success—it is 
sturdily hinged and fastened. I won’t spoil the film’s 
ending, suffice it to highlight a simple intuition 
here at play: in the eyes of the law and in the eyes 
of the audience, these four walls, door, and roof are 
the necessary features of a house. We recognize the 
space of the house bounded within these closed, 
basic elements. We recognize it as the space of the 
private, where inhabitants’ bodies are “sheltered” 
and safe. This characterization is time and again 
set in opposition (or patent complementarity) 
with the space of the public. Built public spaces 
evoke imaginaries of collectivity and seamlessness; 
of civicism and openness. Built private spaces 
evoke imaginaries of control and identifiable 
boundaries,  of refuge, individuality and sustenance.1 

Property, Necessity and Housing. 
Reconsidering the Situated Right 
to a Place to Be

Erika Brandl



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I have detailed Il Tetto’s dwelling as fastened, closed and in many ways, 
impenetrable. One ought not to penetrate this little portion of city space, 
as it is now walled off and occupied. Regardless of nearby activities, events, 
gatherings, infrastructures—that which lies behind these walls is not to be 
touched. 

This filmic set-up hints at an established legal and sociocultural 
principle. There exists an architectural inside and outside. Both inside and 
outside spaces operate according to a given set of rules. Luisa and Natale’s 
shack represents the paradigmatic inside space of the home. As such, we 
attribute to it the sacredness of private property. “That which lies behind 
these walls is not to be touched”—in most cultures, the claim is gospel.2  
The walls’ outside can be declined in many degrees of publicness, and thus 
operate according to varying rules and laws. Yet, as I will demonstrate in 
this article, the architecture of private property, with a marked focus on the 
architecture of dwellings, arises as existentially significant because of the 
functions which it enables and protects. Commonplace definitions of what 
constitutes a good “dwelling” or “house” allude to human necessity, but 
ultimately fall short of providing us with true housing adequacy. This, I 
posit, is because they limit their scope to physical features (walls, windows, 
floors, doors, roofs) and their delimitation of a private inside, opposed to a 
public outside. They do so, however, without clarifying those very essential 
human functions. To be sure, housing architectures are constituted of 
basic, physical elements; they allow for a form of domestic life which can 

Vittorio De Sica, Il Tetto (1956)



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hardly take place in streets, parks and urban squares. 
Why is this the case? Why must something be done 
inside and not outside the house? In this article, 
I return to the seminal works of Jeremy Waldron 
and Richard Epstein in order to clarify what is at 
stake with the principles of adequacy and property 
which oversee one’s life in dwelling. I comment 
on the functions of publicly and privately built 
infrastructures, considering notions of individual 
freedom and flourishing. “Why must something 
be done inside and not outside the house?” is 
another way of asking “Why are dwellings so 
necessary to us?”—returning to this straightforward 
interrogation, and examining it in light of a rights-
based tradition of political philosophy, allows 
for an improved understanding of contemporary 
architectural challenges. In the concluding part of 
my examination, I make use of different scenarios 
to highlight the tension following from stringent 
boundaries in societies where individuals’ right to 
adequate dwelling is not fulfilled. In particular, I 
recuperate Alejandra Mancilla’s cosmopolitanist 
reasoning on the old right of necessity and apply 
it explicitly to urban situations, where public and 
private boundaries order the sustenance of human 
life. This leads to new considerations on the 
policing of urban spaces, and on the duties of states 
in ensuring the fulfillment of the right to adequate 
dwelling (or right to housing).

Before I start this investigation, I need to clarify 
the important difference between the “right to 
housing” and “housing rights.” The former term 
refers to a moral right. It is a justificatory argument, 
a condition which relates to licit individual 
interests, and which is informed by sociocultural 
norms or standards. The latter term refers to a legal 
right, to conditions granted by statutes. Housing 
rights are concerned with statutory features, or law 
entitlements, such as those on which Luisa and 
Natale depended. In other words, housing rights 
will describe what provisions might be (content 



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definition, legality), but not why they ought to be (content justification, 
morality). This article focusses on the normative framework, examining 
implications and features of a right to adequate dwelling infrastructures, 
and exploring the question on what grounds such a right performs. Or 
simply put, why it exists, and what should be its content in terms of legal 
protections and provisions. The same conceptual logic applies to the canon 
“right to the city”, which links back to moral and justificatory arguments. 
Finally, while the term “housing” evokes a formal specificity that the term 
“dwelling” fittingly avoids, I use both words interchangeably. Political and 
activist cultures which mobilize around this issue have, for the most part, 
adopted the expression “right to housing.” So, I maintain a connection 
with these cultures by recuperating it literally in my text. 

On individuals’ situated freedom to be 
I first turn to legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron. His ‘Homelessness 

and the Issue of Freedom’ (1991) remains to this day one of the most 
rigorous and spirited philosophical studies of the issue of housing. This 
account has led prominent scholars to revise their libertarian position on 
the existence of a human right to an adequate dwelling.3 As the text deals 
with the nature of vagrancy and public and private ownership, it reveals 
the complexity of the occupation of space in cities, as well as the impact 
of housing inadequacy on human dignity, welfare and liberty. Jeremy 
Waldron begins by reminding the reader of the importance to revise the 
liberal discourse surrounding an (ever more limited) individual right to be 
in a place. In a manner which echoes that of famed philosophers of welfare 
rights, he expresses his frustrations at the lofty-sounding but ultimately 
inconsistent commitments of liberal theorists, which are here accused of 
glossing over the questions raised by the absence or the gross inadequacy 
of housing, and in particular by homelessness. These questions relate to the 
“most basic principles of liberty”, and so ought to preoccupy us every bit 
as much as more familiar worries about torture, the suppression of dissent, 
and other violations of human rights.4 Waldron proceeds to detail people’s 
situated nature, which brings him to call for a complete requalification 
of what is understood as dignified—adequate—occupations of spaces, be 
they private or public. What, then, is implied by people’s situated nature? 
In brief, all actions must be situated. This follows from the simple fact that 
“everything that is done has to be done somewhere.”5 As embodied beings, 
we are always located. We are not free to perform an act unless there is 
some place we are free to perform it in. Such statements are banal, but 
to Waldron they hint at the possibility of speaking of housing as one of 
the most significant goods, if not “the most significant.”6 Or, to rephrase 



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this in the evocative language of capability, they 
hint at the possibility of speaking of housing as one 
of the most significant enablers of essential human 
functions. 

Rights are interrelated and interdependent. 
The right to a safe, situated place corresponds to 
the freedom of exercise of all other rights. The idea 
at play for Waldron is that an individual who has 
no site of dwelling is completely and at all times 
at the mercy of others. Crucially, and I will return 
to this idea, there is no place governed by private 
property rules or increasingly stringent public 
property rules where she is allowed to be and do 
at will. She cannot make use of her most basic 
functionings as she basically has no right to be 
anywhere. If our conceptions of human freedom, 
welfare or autonomy are to relate to a person’s most 
vital interests and functions, we can see how the 
situated nature of individuals points at the special 
importance of domestic architecture in relation to 
the exercise of most basic capabilities. Now, there 
may not seem anything “particularly autonomous 
or self-assertive or civically republican or ethically 
ennobling about sleeping or cooking or urinating.”7 
These are actions and activities that we rarely find 
referenced in philosophical treaties or doctrines 
on space. Still, it very much matters when people 
are not free to perform such actions. Maybe we 
think that sleeping and excreting aren’t dignified 
actions, but we can nevertheless agree that there is 
something profoundly, inherently undignified about 
preventing someone from performing these actions. 
If a person needs to urinate, what she needs above 
all as a dignified person is the “freedom to do so in 
privacy and relative independence of the arbitrary 
will of anyone else.”8 Waldron wants his readers 
to realize that the access to an adequate dwelling 
literally corresponds to the freedom to be in some 
delimitated, physical place—at least one place—to 
undertake basic human functions. Remember that 
if we are not at liberty to undertake these basic 

    who has no 
site of dwelling 

is completely 
and at all times 
at the mercy of 

others.  

“

”



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activities, we are not, properly stated, able to live at all. Consequently, 
impairment of normal functioning through housing inadequacy constitutes 
a fundamental injustice: a harmful restriction on one’s capabilities, on her 
individual freedom and on individual opportunity related to our “normal, 
species-typical” opportunity range.9 Or, to put it plainly, impairment of 
normal functioning through housing inadequacy constitutes a severe right 
violation.

Let me shortly return to Il Tetto. When I spoke of Luisa and Natale’s 
little shack, I associated it with commonplace imaginaries of control and 
identifiable boundaries, with notions of refuge and individuality. This 
ought to be emphasized, the existential importance of one’s dwelling 
goes beyond the provision of life-sustaining material equipment. It must 
also provide for security of possession and tranquility. Walls of houses 
shall not be trespassed, windows shall not be shattered, nor shall doors 
be forced open. What is found inside one’s house, bodies, objects or 
resources, must be shielded for this house to be deemed adequate. The 

haven that our young Italian couple hurriedly erected overnight provides 
them with tools of subsistence, but also with the abovementioned security 
of possession and tranquility. These provisions are equally important 
and interconnected. They jointly participate in enabling individuals’ 
basic functions. Interestingly, one key aspect of the institution of private 
property is shown here. As an institution, property is a salutary social 
arrangement which ensures a more functional, safe and peaceful life with 
others.10 Private property has been broadly celebrated as that which can 

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guarantee independence by providing the material 
basis for self-reliance, as well as that which can 
secure a space free from the arbitrary power of other 
individuals (a critical form of self-defense against 
outer domination or abuse). And it is no coincidence 
that the latter feature recalls Waldron’s portrayal of 
persons without dwelling as “completely and at 
all times at the mercy of others,” and needing the 
“freedom, privacy and relative independence of the 
arbitrary will of anyone else.” To be housed holds an 
existential significance. As they work to guarantee 
a certain level of security and the satisfaction of 
our basic needs, we accept and respect property 
arrangements.11 These arrangements are formalized 
as the built infrastructure of villages, towns and 
cities. In ‘Property and Necessity’ (1990), Richard 
A. Epstein confirms these advantages, when he 
discusses the “powerful,” “wonderful idea” of 
private property as a legal and sociocultural model.12 
While he warns his readership that such a model 
cannot define a complete state of affairs between 
individuals, and that it must allow for holdouts, 
Epstein demonstrates the beneficial effects of these 
property rights in terms of personal freedom, 
welfare, and skill development. As new dwellers, 
Luisa and Natale can now enjoy the institutionalized 
protection of their physical person and possessions. 
They can rest assured, and so, hope to flourish. 

Life-sustaining appropriateness of public and private 
architectures, with remarks on houses
In light of these security-related features 

of property, natural interrogations arise. Is 
it an unreasonable assumption to equate the 
infrastructure which allows for basic human 
activities with the architecture of housing? What are 
the different relations of property which might 
bring safety and tranquility about? Can individuals 
not achieve subsistence and security of possession 
in other built environments? Are public spaces 
really not fit for sustaining such bodily life and 



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development? After all, Waldron’s ‘Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom’ 
presents a conceptual defense of one’s right to a place, not a house. It first 
looks like that those essential actions and activities which we carry on in 
our home could simply be carried on elsewhere. This greatly diminishes 
the significance of dwelling adequacy in a rights perspective, as individuals 
who are not properly housed are at liberty to undertake these important 
actions elsewhere. Such a refutation has been prompted against homeless 
individuals and anti-homelessness activists when they invoke the human 
right to a house. The reply goes along the line that being housed is not the 
only condition or space to undertake situated acts like cooking, sleeping, 
showering, and so on. Under this view, a defense of housing-related bodily 
considerations simply proves the importance of our individual right to 
some kind of place—this doesn’t mean that this place should be a house. It 
might be, indeed, a public space, like a municipal restroom, a street bench 
or a subway platform. It could be an underpass, a free urban camping, 
a gazebo in the town hall’s gardens. To homeless individuals, these sites 
are accessible on account of their outer, open-air situation. This simple 
insight reminds us of where we began. There exists an architectural inside 
and outside; both inside and outside spaces operate according to a given 
set of rules—a bundle of property laws. A stringent set of rules protects 
architectural “insides” (houses, but also schools, banks, shops) and their 
occupants in ways that allow them to safely undertake various life-enabling 
doings. If public spaces are to be understood as the negative of buildings, or 
architectural “outsides,” a different set of rules is enforced.13 What’s more, 
these very rules often tend to work against the realization and protection 
of individual, essential functions. 

Admittedly, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the current, 
severe forms of policing one’s actions in public places. This phenomenon 
is observable in cities across the Global North and South.14 A large number 
of laws prohibit behaviors that we have identified as necessary to the 
accomplishment of basic human activities. Think of barbecuing in a city 
park (one must eat), sleeping overnight in a bus shelter (one must sleep), 
bathing in a retention basin (one must wash) or urinating in the street (one 
must excrete). We are forbidden to carry out these acts in many public sites. 
The rules regulating what one is free to do in such sites frequently turn 
out to be as stringent and exclusive as those exerted by private property 
owners. This puts individuals back in a position where they have to ask for 
permission (from public authorities) to undertake the basic functions that 
make life possible, thereby violating their personal freedom to do so. So, 
the right to undertake these basic functions seems to demand more than 
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of occupying an architectural “inside.” Now, there 
exists instances of outer, open-air sites where 
propertyless individuals are allowed to undertake 
basic, bodily actions and activities. Think for a 
start of the wide outdoors of Norway or Sweden, 
where a long-established Allemannsretten (right to 
roam) ensures everyone’s access to the resources and 
space of the wilderness. Though I focus here on 
villages, towns and cities; defining public spaces as 
the negative of built infrastructure does suppose a 
minimum concentration of buildings. Architectural 
traditions of public restrooms (Singapore leads by 
example) are still present in several urban centers. 
So are municipal washbasins (Portuguese lavatórios 
públicos, among others) and drinking fountains 
(see the Cochabamba public water facilities, 
established after the activist pressure of the Bolivian 
Coordinadora para la Defensa del Agua y de la 
Vida). In North Africa, communal bread ovens, an 
institution of their own, guarantee one’s possibility 
to bake. Long iftar (fast-breaking) tables are 
deployed in the streets of many Near and Middle 
Eastern cities. Such formal typologies still stand, but 
in diminished numbers. Since the modernization 
and privatization of household equipment, many of 
them were effectively dismantled and abandoned, 
and refashioned inside the domestic space.15 
Stricter policing of streets, squares or urban parks 
ensued: law infringements and displays of so-
called inappropriate behavior in common urban 
environments are known to be disciplined with 
hefty fines. It appears that, for a critical number of 
extant (homeless) individuals, their right to carry 
out basic bodily functions does necessitate more 
than the right to be in a public space, thus pointing 
to the occupation of an architectural “inside.” But 
should these “insides” be de facto houses? 

I argue that they should. The aforesaid principles 
of security of possession and tranquility are hardly 
ensured in drop-in shelters, charity dormitories, 
and other public refuges, where permanent 

defining 
public spaces 

as the negative 
of built 

infrastructure 
does suppose 

a minimum 
concentration 

of buildings.

“

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occupancy and object storage are, to a large extent, proscribed. Without 
sturdy dividing walls, safe storage, padlocks or the likes, one lacks the 
privacy and the autonomy of dignified life, and is left in a position of 
vulnerability.16 We already know that lacking a permanent house already 
means to expose one’s body to numerous threats and deprivations, which 
incapacitate homeless individuals in ways that prevent them to lead a 
decent or minimally-good existence (even less a flourishing one). The 
straightforward value of our reflection on commonplace imaginaries of 
control and identifiable boundaries lies in showing us that even in cases 
where their bodies are sheltered within walls and under roofs, people 
remain critically incapacitated. As private architectural “insides”, houses 
participate in good mental health as much as in good physical one. 
Without these dimensions of security, tranquility, intimacy, and so on, 
public shelters can’t be places where one develops and makes good use 
of her basic functions. If a situated place to be doesn’t provide us with 

the freedom, privacy and relative independence from the arbitrary will of 
anyone else, it remains deeply inadequate. Recalling living out in the streets 
or in temporary shelters, many individuals spoke of a feeling that they 
didn’t (have the capability to) have a life worth living, as if their individual 
resilience had derived from solid walls which were no longer.17 Vittorio 
De Sicca’s dramatic script plays on this idea that, as new “homeowners,” 
Luisa and Natale can truly begin to live. In a few words, we need here 
to consider the different modes of ownership—or, to formulate it in an 
Epsteinian manner, the different relations of property, which enable the 

Vittorio De Sica, Il Tetto (1956)



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good exercise of people’s most basic activities. I 
follow UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human 
Settlements program for human settlements and 
sustainable urban development, in identifying 
“secure tenure” as the important feature in one’s 
relation of property to housing.18 Secure tenure 
refers to legal recognition of one’s control over 
her living space, through ownership or usufruct. 
This is really key. Individuals can assuredly achieve 
adequacy in dwelling through rental situations; 
despite the widespread association of the advantages 
of private property with home ownership, usufruct 
forms of tenure can allow for security of possession 
and tranquility.19 In all cases, it is my opinion that 
they only do so when non-owners (tenants on the 
private rental market and in public social housing) 
have a reasonable level of control over the place that 
they occupy, and when permanent place attachment 
is made possible through strong rent contract 
protections. The details fall outside the scope of my 
brief exploration here, but it is important to stress 
that adequate usufruct can enable basic, housing-
contingent functions.  

The right of necessity revisited
We have established the importance of dwelling 

architecture: while it may vary in size or shape, 
the inner place that we call home enables essential 
actions and activities. To be deprived of housing is 
a direct threat to one’s existence. This interrelation 
is reflected by the human right to housing and its 
associated claims and duties. Walls, doors, windows, 
ceilings and floors are more than ordinary material 
arrangements. They protect our bodies and minds, 
they allow for our most vital interests and functions 
to be realized, and to develop. And, given this special, 
situated importance, they are themselves protected 
by potent property laws. In the last part of this 
article, I utilize the political philosophy of Alejandra 
Mancilla to clarify the moral underpinnings of 
property rights. In particular, I examine the weighty 



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ways in which this “bundle of rights” relates to dire housing deprivation and 
needs.20 Mancilla’s thought-provoking writings on moral cosmopolitanism 
and global poverty shed new light on the permissibility of actions in the 
face of such housing deprivation, by advocating the right of necessity, a 
right of the needy to take the material resources they need for subsistence, 
from those who are not similarly needy.21 It is a privilege (absence of duty 
not to take others’ possessions to ensure one’s own subsistence) as well as a 
claim (you have a duty not to stop the needy from taking your possessions). 
While it first seems at odds with the institution of private property, the 
right of necessity is actually consistent with accepting its very legitimacy. 
Richard Epstein reminds us that the recognition of the right of necessity is, 
in effect, one of the internal limitations which ought to be included in any 
such legitimate institution, an escape valve of sorts. A system of exceptions 
based upon strong, if variegated, perceptions of necessity, is necessary to 
people’s endorsement of private property as a prime social arrangement.22 
The moral intuition at play is that no system of property entitlements that 
could “reasonably command the acceptance of all who are subject to it” 
could include a requirement that an individual starve or freeze to death 
as the cost of respecting the proprietorial rights of others over what one 
needs to survive.23 In emergency scenarios of necessity, and as a means 
of last resort, the law must allow for entries upon land and interference 
with personal property that would otherwise have been trespass. Alejandra 
Mancilla builds from this operation of justification, arguing that it is 
unreasonable to restrict the right of necessity to emergency cases, when the 
global economic order is structured in a way that maintains millions in a 
precarious state. Or, to realign this line of thought to the present paper: it 
is unreasonable to do so when housing markets worldwide are structured 
in ways that maintain many in a precarious state with regard to dwelling 
adequacy. 

Consider the four following scenarios. 1) While on a hiking trip on 
some high mountain plateau, you get lost without proper clothing and 
equipment. You are alone, exposed, and frozen. But you finally spot a hut 
in the distance. When you go there, you find its door locked. You then 
proceed to break one window, crawl inside and find shelter until aid comes. 
2) On a sail trip with your family, a violent storm breaks out. You manage 
to approach some private pier and moor your boat to it, guaranteeing you 
and your family’s safety, and protecting the boat from material damages. 
3) You are a homeless individual in the cold winter night. The town’s drop-
in refuge is situated at too long a walking distance, and you are fighting 
sleep. You are alone, exposed, and frozen. Spotting a tenement building 
with an empty ground floor, you go there and find its door locked. You 



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then proceed to break one window, crawl inside 
and find shelter until the day comes. 4) You are 
a homeless individual in the extreme heatwave of 
the summer. You feel weak, debilitated by heat 
exhaustion. No one offers you water or help. You 
climb over the fence of a private courtyard and 
jump in the fresh pool, cooling your body down. 
These four scenarios describe emergency situation 
where one’s subsistence is at stake, but 1) and 2) are 
often more readily accepted as invocations of the 
right of necessity.24 As Mancilla puts it well, 

in our current world, acceptance of the right of 
necessity remains confined to cases of one-off, 
mostly naturally caused emergencies. … This 
means that if an individual takes someone else’s 
property and claims that he did so because his 
right to subsistence was unmet, he will probably 
end up punished by society and by the law: 
common morality tends to sanction property 
infringements almost with no exceptions, and 
legal systems reject exculpation based on extreme 
poverty or indigence.25     

We should ask ourselves: should we uphold a 
narrow conception of the right of necessity when 
current urban and economic arrangements, and 
their related application of property rights, have not 
been designed in a manner that guarantees access 
to minimum material provisions for all? Entry 
upon land and interference with personal property 
do appear reasonable and acceptable in urban 
milieus which lack the infrastructure to provide 
the needy with housing. This is a provocative 
statement, especially when contrasted with our 
past examination of the importance of security of 
possession and tranquility: the claim which follows 
from the invocation of one’s right of necessity (well-
off individuals mustn’t prevent a destitute person 
from taking their possessions) proves to be extremely 
demanding. I have pleaded that a house is not a 
standing reserve, or an investment opportunity, but 
the armature for self-integrity and bodily security: 

Entry upon 
land and 

interference 
with personal 

property 
do appear 

reasonable and 
acceptable in 
urban milieus 

which lack the 
infrastructure 

to provide the 
needy with 

housing.

“

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it ought not to be violated. Human freedom, autonomy, health, dignity, 
agency— these notions are to be safeguarded by enforcing property rights, 
because such rights suppose a basic guarantee of security. Controlling 
one’s own home is an immediate expression of one’s will. Freedom is not 
something which just occurs in thought. It requires some physical domain 
outside the person’s own mind where she can actualize her will, without 
external interference. Yet again, if subsistence cannot be ensured in public 
spaces, or through welfare programs and social architecture, necessity can 
justify the infringement of one’s home. But this is an untenable prospect 
for any functional, organized society. I believe that these tensions (and 
our overall normative findings on property, necessity and the architecture 
of housing) reveal the special responsibility of states in ensuring their 
citizens’ vital human activities and interests, through the realization of 
housing adequacy for all. In other words, it is morally incumbent on 
states to rearrange property provisions in a way that does not leave the 
houseless in a position where they may legitimately invoke their right of 
necessity.26 Housing shortages and deprivations are attributable to the 
way in which current human institutions are framed. Cultures such as 
ours, where ordinary circumstances consist in severe housing inadequacy 
co-existing with extreme wealth and luxurious dwelling (according to 
numbers collated in recent years, “more than 11 million homes lied empty 
in Europe alone, enough to house all of the continent’s homeless twice 
over”),27 must undergo change. Through redistributive policies, projects 
and statutes, governments are best suited for implementing such a change. 

The ramifying details of housing-related duties borne by states deserve 
a separate investigation. Suffice it to conclude by asserting that in a 
hypothetical society where the universal fulfillment of the human right 
to housing is guaranteed under normal circumstances, the exercise of the 
right of necessity would be confined to exceptional situations like scenarios 
1) and 2). And until such hypothetical societies become reality, and while 
they work on the implementation of new housing schemes (construction 
of social units, rent caps, expropriations of speculative architecture), state 
authorities should refrain from strictly policing certain open spaces in the 
city. Il Tetto’s Luisa and Natale could attempt at building and keeping their 
shack because the regulations of 1950s Rome allowed for people to secure 
their right to a parcel of land and house if they manage to construct the 
latter without being stopped by the authorities. This suggests something 
like the beginning of a humanist attitude of tolerance and flexibility 
(or even a sense of justice)  in the face of immediate, bodily necessity. 
Similarly, we can think of the Chilean callamperos (urban propertyless), a 
group of working-class people who, between the 1950s and 1970s, became 



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known for occupying some empty patches of 
Santiago overnight. Remarkably, these callamperos 
were rarely evicted. If municipal actors tried to 
pursue this path of eviction, the callamperos resisted 
pacifically until the latter gave up. This amounted 
to a tacit approval of their occupying actions by 
the authorities, as well as the surrounding city 
dwellers.28 These two historical cases teach us a 
worthy lesson. The infrastructure of housing is 
expansive and expensive: given the impossibility 
of immediate remediation of what were severe 
shortages of dwelling, the municipal governments 
of Rome and Santiago showed leniency towards 
what was allowed in the open air, public spaces of 
their cities. We should follow their example, as of 
today and in coming times of housing crises. 

Endnotes
1. Richard A. Epstein, ‘Property and Necessity’, 

Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol.3, 
1990, 4.

2. Property and its declinations in private, common 
or communal subgroups refers to the rules that 
govern people’s access to and control of things: it 
is a feature of human cultures across the world. 
Yet, it must be stressed that a lot of African, 
Indian, Asian, or North American indigenous 
architecture are articulated around deeply 
different notions of privacy and publicness, 
privileging togetherness in ways that make little 
importance of walls and hard boundaries (think 
of the Jewish kibbutz, one example among 
other). This topic is deserving of a stand-alone 
study, and so falls outside the scope of the present 
paper.

3. Peter King, ‘Housing as a freedom right’, Housing 
Studies, Vol.18, No.5, 2011, 661.

4. Jeremy Waldron, ‘Homelessness and the Issue of 
Freedom’, UCLA Law Review 295, 1992, 296

5. Ibid., 296.
6. Ibid., 296.



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7. Ibid., 296.
8. Ibid., 321-322.
9. Norman Daniels, ‘Health-Care Needs and Distributive Justice’, 

Philosophy of Public Affairs, Vol.4, No.2, 219.
10. Alejandra Mancilla, The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and 

Global Poverty (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 15.
11. Mancilla, The Right of Necessity, 15.
12. Epstein, ‘Property and Necessity’, 3-4.
13. Again, there exists many examples of non-Western cultures where (for 

reasons linked to social traditions, climate, and so on) the difference 
between inside and outside is much more diffused—it is softer than 
the hard limits of walls and fences that we associate with the division of 
space in Western cultures.

14. UN-Habitat, The Right to Adequate Housing, 2009; https://www.ohchr.
org/documents/publications/fs21_rev_1_housing_en.pdf.

15. Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the human 
right to safe drinking water and sanitation, 2011; https://www2.ohchr.
org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/18session/A-HRC-18-33-Add4_
en.pdf.

16. Carol McNaughton Nicholls, Transitions through Homelessness: Lives on 
the Edge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 17.

17. McNaughton Nicholls, Transitions through Homelessness, 17.
18. UN-Habitat, The Right to Adequate Housing.
19. Stuart Hodkinson, ‘The Return of the Housing Question’, Ephemera | 

Theory & Politics in Organization, Vol.12, No.4, 2012, 426.
20. Epstein, ‘Property and Necessity’, 2-3.
21. Alejandra Mancilla quoted in Garrett Cullity, ‘Mancilla, Alejandra. 

The Right of Necessity’, Ethics, No.128, 2017, 260.
22. Epstein, ‘Property and Necessity’, 7-8.
23. Cullity, ‘Mancilla, Alejandra. The Right of Necessity’, 261.
24. We tend to assume that it is no fault of the hiker or the sailor that 

they find themselves using someone else’s property—they were unlucky, 
trapped in a hostile landscape; the hut or the pier was the only possible 
option available to ensure their physical security. On the other hand, we 
tend to assume—and quite uncharitably so—personal failure and fault 
when it comes to homeless individuals’ struggles for necessity; plus, 
cities are dense environments, with a (presupposed) network of available 
resources. According to this logic, violating someone’s property cannot 
be a means of last resort for 3) or 4).

25. Mancilla, The Right of Necessity, 71.
26. Ibid., 71.



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27. Rupert Neate, ‘Scandal of Europe’s 11m 
empty homes’, 2014; https://www.theguardian.
com/society/2014/feb/23/europe-11m-empty-
properties-enough-house-homeless-continent-
twice (accessed 2020-03-17).

28. Mancilla, The Right of Necessity, 87-88. 



protests in hong kong (2019)



The storming of the Legislative Council in Hong 
Kong by a group of local activists on July 1, 2019 
marked a turn of events in what was until then the 
largest ever series of political demonstrations in the 
semi-autonomous Chinese territory. In the months 
that followed, Hong Kong was shaken by violence 
and unrest unseen since the riots in the 1960s 
against the British Colonial rule. The emergence of 
these scenes of total chaos in a city where safety and 
efficiency of shared urban space and infrastructure 
are enormously valued and sustained at highest 
levels effectively generated a fundamental sense of 
destabilization. This article introduces an ancient 
Chinese cultural notion, jianghu, with the aim 
of contributing to an enriched and differentiated 
cultural understanding of these events and the 
transformation of urban space they effected. 

The first part introduces jianghu in contrast to the 
dichotomy of the public and the private so deeply 
rooted in Western civilization. The comparison is 
not so much about suggesting jianghu as a substitute 
concept to replace existing interpretations entirely, 
but an attempt and an invitation to open new 
perspectives of understanding of a place that is the 
hybrid result of a complexity of cultural influences 
and unique historical and political circumstances. 
The section that follows outlines an image of Hong 
Kong as a city during times of peace, as well as a 
very brief account of its political history, to provide 
the background for the subsequent description and 
interpretation of a Hong Kong shaken by protests 
as a contemporary form of jianghu. The last portion 
of the essay describes the actions within and the 
transformation of urban spaces during the violent 

Anonymity in Jianghu: Hong Kong’s 
Urban Space in Times of Crisis

Esther Lorenz



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protests in Hong Kong between July and November 2019 to illustrate the 
congruence between characteristics of jianghu as known from Chinese film 
and literature and the events that deeply unsettled the Hong Kong territory.

The Private and the Public 
The question of public space from a Western perspective is grounded 

in the dichotomy of public and private inherent in an understanding of 
the city that is deeply rooted in the Greek polis. While the existence of and 
stability of the family is a precondition for a productive engagement in 
public life in the ancient city-state, the duality between the two realms is 
distinct. Aristotle speaks about two lives that exist in parallel.1 As Hannah 
Arendt points out, Greek society maintains a sharp distinction between 
the home and the family on the one hand—dedicated to a life grounded 
in biological association and characterized by command—and political 
organization on the other—negotiated through the process of persuasion.2

In Chinese culture, grown from its own ancient roots, this sharp 
distinction between public and private has never taken place. The family, 
like in the Greek polis, is at the beginning of society, and in Chinese culture 
it is also at its core. Rather than forming a parallel realm, socio-political 
structures grow in expansion from the notion of the family and the home, 
and are deeply rooted in Confucianist thought. They establish a societal 
and spatial framework distinctly different from that in the West that Li 
Shiqiao identifies as “degrees of care.”3 

This resonates with the conception of tianxia, a term that dates back to 
philosophical writings from the Zhou period and that maintained a steady 
influence throughout China’s history. It literally translates as “all under 
heaven” and denotes a normative “world” that can be understood as the 
largest existing form of the family, deeply imbued with Confucian values 
of morality and hierarchy. Zhao Tingyang discusses the “isomorphism 
between family and tianxia” during the Zhou dynasty that ties together 
a political order of tianxia providing protection for each family with an 
ethical order that extends “family relationality into the tianxia institutional 
order.”4 Tianxia establishes a hierarchy grounded in morality and power 
and acted out by paying tributes, which correspond to giving respect to 
parents and ancestors within a family. Zhao points out the all-inclusiveness 
of tianxia as its fundamental characteristic that leads to a conception of an 
interiorization of the entire world with “no outside.”5

Yet, there are gaps that emerge between the extended circles of familial 
care, and there are limits to their capacity to be all-encompassing. There 
are positions of rejection and projections of alternative worlds. There are 
individuals who deliberately withdraw themselves from the hierarchical, 



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established order, acting upon a variety of motives. 
In fiction and in reality this realm outside the 
normative order is known as jianghu. 

Jianghu – an External Realm of Non-structured Action
Jianghu is a Chinese cultural concept that literally 

translates as “rivers and lakes.” The term can be 
traced back to the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi. 
In his writings the term denotes a life freed from 
officialdom, career aspirations and family ties. He 
uses “rivers and lakes” synonymously with the 
Way, the Tao, the natural realm for man and his 
thinking that is characterized by purposelessness 
and detachment.6 Zhuang Zi’s writings in a 
political sense promote non-hierarchical, dynamic 
organization of human life.7 

Over time the term has developed a rich 
spectrum of meaning both through fiction as well as 
through history. The aspect that remains constant 
between the evolving uses and interpretations of 
this concept is that jianghu establishes a position 
outside regulated systems, from which these can be 
reflected on, opposed, and overturned. This logic 
appears as a frequent feature in the narratives of 
Chinese martial arts tales and movies, commonly 
described as wuxia. The most influential tale to date 
to describe the realm of jianghu in relation to wuxia 
is the novel Outlaws of the Marsh or Water Margin 
(水滸傳, by Shi Nai’an, 14th century), situated in 
the period of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The 
book tells the story of 108 rebels who, frustrated by 
the political environment and the living conditions 
at that time, “became leaders of an outlaw army 
of thousands and fought brave and resourceful 
battles against pompous, heartless tyrants.”8 The 
protagonists withdraw from their everyday lives 
and hide in the marshes of Liangshan in Shandong 
province to prepare for and to conduct the fight 
for justice against the corrupt ruling order. While 
regular society is hierarchical and highly structured, 
jianghu does not have structure, it relies on alliances 

In Chinese 
culture, 
A sharp 

distinction 
between 

public and 
private has 

never taken 
place. 

The family 
is at the 

beginning of 
society, 

and is also 
at its core. 

“

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and honor codes that are fluid and subject to change. 
As the conceptual dwelling place for itinerant performers, healers, 

swordsmen, beggars, and outlaws both in real life as well as in fiction, 
jianghu forms the antithesis to home and the family. In martial arts tales, 
jianghu is frequently treated as a realm that one can enter, but also again 
leave, to return to home and family. It is distinct from shanlin, “mountains 
and forests,” the retreat for Daoist monks and hermits. While shanlin is a 
place for non-action and spiritual contemplation, jianghu is characterized 
by action that is committed to effecting change in society.9

In contemporary contexts, jianghu appears in academic discussions 
on the arts and the digital as a potential new realm that enables evasion 
of government control and censorship. But jianghu is different from 
Habermas’ public sphere, where society can openly debate issues of 
common concern. It is in fact a space external to societal structures and 
conventions, from which counter concepts can be envisioned, and battles 
against oppressive, corrupt, or unjust authorities can be fought.

Jianghu may denote the retreat from a regulated life, opposition to 
government in the fight for justice, lawlessness, or personal freedom; it 
signifies both a mental state and a space. While consistently implying some 
form of rejection of a status quo, it has remained vague and malleable in 
its interpretation, and in relation to specific socio-political conditions of 
any given era.

Governmental Care as the Normative Hong Kong 
Hong Kong is a city with an extremely high population and building 

density. The spatial compression produces a three-dimensional urban 
fabric of short distances. In conjunction with a highly efficient public 
transportation infrastructure, the city is primarily navigated on foot, only 
7.6% of the population own a private vehicle.10 Due to this prevalence of 
pedestrianism, Hong Kong’s population density is directly reflected in the 
mass of moving bodies that traverse the city through this three-dimensional 
pedestrian network. These spaces are not made for pause, contemplation or 
flânerie, they are spaces of flow designed to provide the most convenient, 
smooth, and rapid connections between places of living, work, education, 
and leisure. This priority is also reflected in the organization of the spaces 
themselves—surface markings on the floor and overhead signals, reminiscent 
of highway guidance systems, control the use of lanes and direction of flows, 
turnstiles and rail guards manage access and zoning, elevated walkways and 
metal barriers provide clear separation between pedestrian and vehicle space. 

Life in Hong Kong is characterized by an enormous dedication to 
maintaining the constancy, safety, and efficiency of this flow through a high 



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degree of management exerted by the government. 
While these spatial parameters and approach to 
governing are symptomatic of the needs of a city of 
a material and human density as extreme as in Hong 
Kong, conversely, the unique morphology and tight 
organization of the city must be recognized as the 
result of an underlying sociocultural framework that 
enables its formation and sustains its vitality. If seen 
through a Chinese cultural perspective, according 
to Li Shiqiao, the approach of the Hong Kong 
government may need to be understood as one of 
all-encompassing care,11 including the provision of 
open spaces and leisure facilities that are accessible 
to all, but that do not inherently constitute public 
space in a political sense. The level of care by the 
government in maintaining order is matched by 
a high level of compliance from its citizens. The 
cultural basis for this general tolerance of guidance, 
rules, and restrictions in Hong Kong’s population is 
often explained through notions of Confucianism, 
which resonates with the understanding of the city 
as nested scales of familial care that also implies 
loyalty and respect toward government. Hong Kong 
ranks among the safest cities in the world.12 For the 
average citizen violence is an extrinsic phenomenon. 
During normal, peaceful times, space, management 
and conformity are tight, and seem not to leave  
gaps outside the realm of governmental care, with 
few exceptions. In Hong Kong, highways, roads, 
and scarce instances of vacant or abandoned 
land, dangerous and unfit for bodily occupation, 
can be understood as spatial manifestations of 
jianghu, while triad operations embody the social 
manifestation of “rivers and lakes,” as the world of 
“bandits” that runs in parallel and exists hidden 
from and outside the realm of the established order. 
For most Hong Kong citizens jianghu does not 
touch upon their everyday lives but exists in a world 
of literary and cinematic fiction.

In contrast to this perception of stability and 
largely friction-free everyday collective life in the city 



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of Hong Kong there lies an inner struggle, which is rooted in the precarious 
political situation that is fundamental to Hong Kong’s existence—first as 
a British Colony following the Opium Wars, and since the handover of 
the territory to China in 1997, as a “Special Administrative Region” of the 
People’s Republic of China, operating under the motto of “one country, two 
systems.” The identity of Hong Kong people, who are largely comprised 
of immigrants from Mainland China and their descendants—92% of 
Hong Kong’s population are ethnically Chinese—has developed its own 
characteristics overtime, with a self-conception distinctly different from 
the mainland, and at the same time deeply rooted in Chinese culture given 
their ancestral heritage. For many of these immigrants, their transition to 
Hong Kong can be interpreted as constituting various forms of “entering 
jianghu” in relation to Mainland China, either as a realm “outside” allowing 
for alternative lifestyles and opportunities or as a place to evade the control 
of the Central Government. 

While Hong Kong had been open to Western ideas and influences since 
the incremental ceding of the territory to the British, starting in 1842, 
throughout its time as a colony it had been ruled by a governor who was 
directly appointed by the British monarch. The governing efforts of the 
British colonial rule prioritized the maintenance of stability conducive to 
the flourishing of trade and commerce. Absent of substantial provisions 
of democratic institutions and processes, a public sphere in the sense of 
Jürgen Habermas had not been established by the time of the handover 
in 1997.13 

The ambiguity of the Basic Law with regard to instituting universal 
suffrage, in combination with the stipulation that the Chief Executive is 
to be appointed by the Central Government based on a selection “through 
election or through consultations,” present provisions perhaps less 
committed than what contemporary supporters of democracy sometimes 
refer to as “promises.”14 Moreover, the impending end of the 50-year 
period of Hong Kong’s semi-autonomy in 2047 constitutes a looming 
threat that is virtually inescapable. This is exacerbated by instances of 
attempted introductions of new laws that seem to threaten both Hong 
Kong’s identity and stipulated level of independence. To Hong Kong’s 
citizens these appear as premature steps of the realization of Hong Kong’s 
full absorption into China—whatever this final scenario may look like in 
the future—which are feared to violate the provision in the basic law that 
the “The socialist system and policies shall not be practiced in the Hong 
Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system 
and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years.”15 In the past these 
incidents triggered otherwise rare political demonstrations in Hong Kong, 



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such as the protests in 2003 against a new national 
security law, and the demonstrations against the 
introduction of a curriculum of “moral and national 
education” in Hong Kong’s education system in 
2012.16  

The proposition of a new extradition law in 
2019 that would allow criminal suspects to be 
surrendered to China for trial not only triggered 
vehement rejection by the Hong Kong people, 
but it also sparked more violent and sustained 
forms of activism, unseen in the territory for 
over half a century, and unprecedented in some 
of their characteristics and ways of utilizing and 
transforming the spaces of the city. Given Hong 
Kong’s political and cultural hybridity, we need 
differentiated perspectives to think with and 
through the events that took place in this unique 
territory. 

Hong Kong’s Space of Crisis as Jianghu
The protests against the extradition law in 

2019 are to date considered the largest political 
demonstrations that have ever taken place in Hong 
Kong, culminating in up to two million citizens—
more than a quarter of the territory’s population—
gathering in the streets on June 16, 2019.17 They 
came out in opposition to the proposed bill, and 
in protest against the Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s 
decision two days earlier to only suspend rather 
than drop the bill.18

The week before, on June 12, a smaller 
demonstration in front of the government offices 
turned violent when protesters threw bricks and 
metal rods at the police, who in return responded 
with the use of batons, pepper spray and tear gas.19 
In a response on the same day, Lam expressed 
her disapproval of the incident and reiterated her 
rejection of the demonstrators’ demands through 
familial metaphors: “If I let him have his way 
every time my son acts this way, I believe we will 
have a good relationship in the short term. But if 



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I indulge his wayward behaviour, he might regret it after he grows up.”20 
This statement is revealing of the government’s self-conceived parental role 
towards its citizens. In any case it did not resonate well with Hong Kong’s 
youth. The accumulative effect of the reactions by the government in the 
early summer of 2019 such as this one may in fact have unleashed deep-
seated disappointment and desperation in Hong Kong’s young generation, 
who felt increasingly not taken care of at all. These sentiments would 
certainly be grounded in the fear of their cultural identity, values, and way 
of life being jeopardized by the impending end of the “one country two 
systems” stipulation well during their lifetime. These emotions may have 
additionally been exacerbated by the progressive vanishing of perspectives 
in a Hong Kong characterized by an ever-expanding wealth gap in its 
population, driven by an extreme combination of land policy and capitalist 
real estate practices that go all the way back to British colonial rule. 

On July 1, 2019, the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China, 
a group of activists broke into the Legislative Council building, smashed 
the façade and vandalized the interior, sprayed over the flag of Hong 
Kong in the Council chamber, and—strangely enough—raised the 
British Colonial flag in its stead. This sudden shift to violence marked “an 
irreversible step toward escalation”21 and a clear crystallization of two very 
distinct groups of protesters: The first group represented the large majority 
of those demonstrating peacefully and within the boundaries authorized 
for the rallies. While they did express their support for democratic values, 
they raised their voices specifically against the extradition law. After the 
announcement of its suspension, despite lingering disappointment with 
this incomplete concession, these large demonstrations came to an end. 
The anger and dissatisfaction of the second group—comprised of several 
disparate fractions of predominantly young people—did not dissipate. 
In contrary, they grew even stronger. These protesters turned to active 
aggression to provoke a strong response from the government. They 
expanded their demands—which functioned less as an agenda for political 
negotiation than as a declaration of the government’s failings—to a total 
of five with remarkably varying political weight, ranging from universal 
suffrage to elect the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive to amnesty 
for themselves irrespective of the nature of their actions. 

The distinction between these two types of demonstrators is relevant for 
the discussion at hand. The first group, while expressing disagreement and 
staging dramatic scenes of the city’s tight spaces packed with people, acted 
in full compliance with the rules and within behavioral conventions. In 
contrast, the moment of storming the Legislative Council building and the 
sudden shift to violence of the second group, I argue, can be understood 



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as an act of self-withdrawal by the activists from the 
familial care of the Hong Kong government and 
from the order of its societal structure, triggered 
by the sense of abandonment described above. It 
marks their entry into the realm of jianghu. This 
explanation is supported by the radical change in the 
behavior of these activists: the occupation of spaces 
not designed for sojourn, general conduct opposing 
governmental and societal norms, the remaining in 
a tenacious position of opposition throughout the 
government’s various attempts to open a dialogue, 
the active use of violence, the wilful embracing of 
danger, and the blurring of identities. On the surface 
these manifestations may not appear any different 
from political activism and unrest in other places, 
however, in Hong Kong more than anywhere else, 
these stand in stark contradiction to the territory’s 
normative way of life, and importantly, to the young 
activists’ own disciplined conforming to these prior 
to the crisis: “They were becoming something 
different from what they were, a metamorphosis 
that would have been difficult to imagine in orderly 
Hong Kong, a city where you line up neatly for an 
elevator door and crowds don’t step into an empty 
street until the signal changes.”22 

In what follows, I will lay out the corresponding 
implications in terms of the use and adaptation, 
movement within, and re-conceptualization of 
the urban spaces involved, all of which, I argue, 
constitute contemporary manifestations of jianghu. 

Inhabiting and Transforming the Infrastructures of Flows
At first, Victoria Park formed the primary 

gathering and starting point for the formally 
organized demonstrations against the extradition 
bill. As the largest park in Hong Kong, it serves 
as a frequent location for regular public events, 
including the annual Tiananmen vigil (suspended 
since 2019). After a while, the movement shifted 
from Victoria Park to transitory spaces in the city 

these 
manifestations 

may not appear 
any different 

from political 
activism and 

unrest in other 
places, however, 
in Hong Kong more 

than anywhere 
else, these 

stand in stark 
contradiction to 

the territory’s 
normative way 

of life.

“

”



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such as shopping mall atria, underpasses, elevated walkways, tram stops, 
roads, highways, traffic islands, and the footings of freeway columns; 
precisely those spaces that are dedicated to ensuring efficient traffic flow—
pedestrian or motorized—that are either not designed or even prohibited 
for sojourn. The choice of locations and the actions taken within them not 
only ensured greater visibility and impact of the movement, but they also 
led to a material and conceptual transformation of these spaces. They were 
rendered dysfunctional through the protesters’ actions that caused traffic 
to slow down or to come to a complete stand-still. This constituted a direct 
confrontation with both the government and the order of everyday life in 
the city. Hong Kong’s urban density further potentiated the effectiveness 
of these blockages due to its large population relying on only few high-
performing infrastructural arteries for their daily commutes. 

On the one hand, the transformation of these transitional spaces 
was established through the bodily movement and occupation of the 
protesters, which broke with common societal norms in Hong Kong. 
On the other hand, the spatial mutation was achieved by the physical 
alteration of the spaces themselves: The walls of underground tunnels and 
pedestrian bridges leading to major transport hubs—usually characterized 
by mute and sanitary tile or glass surfaces—were covered with post-its and 
flyers. In aggregation these formed a thick pixelated tapestry of Chinese 
poetry, messages offering emotional support, calls for political change, 
and practical announcements. Guardrails along pedestrian sidewalks 
were dismantled only to be rearranged into various forms of barricades, 
physically and metaphorically breaking with rules and regulations that 
shape Hong Kong’s everyday life. Roads and highways were sprinkled with 
arrangements of paving bricks that transformed them into so-called “brick 
battlegrounds.”23 These were more than simple barricades. The strategic 
composition and distribution of clusters of bricks presented tactics 
explicitly aimed at preventing police response. In the process they hindered 
general road traffic as well. These intentional arrangements produced their 
own aesthetics through the spatial and material transformation of the road 
into a new kind of urban landscape that was now inaccessible to cars: a 
jianghu sphere that called for a mode of movement and inhabitation by 
the human body different from the normative ways of navigating the city; 
perhaps a new form of qinggong—the ability to move lightly and swiftly to 
“cross difficult terrain and scale walls quickly.”24

Roads and highways constitute a most direct analogy between 
jianghu and Hong Kong’s physical urban spaces. Resonating with the 
metaphor of “rivers and lakes” these are spaces for flows of traffic; they 
are separated, dynamic, and they are dangerous to the unprotected body. 



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The occupation and transformation of these urban 
territories establishes jianghu both as an alternative 
space as well as an alternative mode of conduct, 
radically breaking with normative behavior, while 
at the same time exerting enormous pressure on the 
government by blocking the flows of the city that 
are synonymous with its livelihood and efficiency. 

Becoming Water
The Umbrella Movement in 2014 had adopted a 

sedentary approach, which involved the occupation 
of public sites in three locations in the form of 
temporary settlements, comprised of tents and 
managed collectively. In contrast, the 2019 protests 
developed an entirely different strategy—one of 
fluidity and anonymity.

The protesters took inspiration from Bruce Lee’s 
quote “be like water,” which—albeit originating 
in popular culture—is a direct reference to the 
martial arts tradition and the teachings of Taoism.25 
They rephrased it to describe their own tactics: 
Be strong like ice. Be fluid like water. Gather like 
dew. Scatter like mist. The protests were organized 
in a dispersed, temporary, and dynamically shif-
ting manner, popping up in various locations, 
making it difficult to predict when and where they 
would occur, and for police to respond. The non-
hierarchical organization without any identifiable 
leadership inhibited the police from pinpointing 
anyone responsible. The gear worn by the activists 
provided physical protection from teargas and 
basic equipment for defense and attack, and at the 
same time, it veiled the wearers’ identity, ensuring 
anonymity despite the omnipresence of security 
cameras, mobile phone cameras, and press cameras. 
The quasi-uniform outfit also led to the dissolution 
of the individual body into the group of acting 
bodies, foregrounding their alliance and cause, 
and the impression of both single parts and masses 
of dynamically changing matter moving in urban 
space. 



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With a heightened awareness of urban surveillance technology, activists 
took an array of measures to incapacitate or bypass it. These ranged from 
the spraying of surveillance cameras to more sophisticated spatial tactics, 
such as the occupation of and movement across roofs of buildings and 
elevated walkways—modes of traversing the city previously only known 
from Hong Kong’s gangster movies—to evade the field of vision of 
surveillance cameras in the city’s pedestrian walkway system, effectively 
hiding in plain sight. They became invisible to the authorities’ cameras and 
face recognition software yet remained highly visible to Hong Kong citizens 
looking up from the streetscape, over from adjoining walkways or down 
from office and residential towers. Hong Kong’s unique morphology and 
density significantly contributed to the formation as well as the increase 
in intensity of this confrontation and juxtaposition of the ordered and the 
unruly, the hidden and the visible. The explicit use of water metaphors led 
to the protests being named the “Water Revolution” in news coverage.26 
The variety of such metaphors used to develop, communicate, and 
perform protest tactics suggest an overall strategy of becoming water to 
find anonymity and a segregated space of action in the “rivers and lakes” 
that are jianghu. 

Digital Jianghu
Social media and the internet played a key role in the mobilization 

and organization of the movement, as well as in developing forms of 
counter surveillance directed at the authorities through the strategic 
documentation and subsequent broadcasting of actions conducted by the 
police. Digital tactics employed by the activists included a combination 
of online art, forums, and live streaming. Fearful that the Hong Kong 
government might increasingly adopt measures of internet surveillance 
and censorship known to be employed in Mainland China, the protesters’ 
set of social media applications and technologies of data sharing was 
carefully curated as to not leave any digital traces of their identities. The 
use of non-mainstream messenger apps—the Telegram application and the 
local lihkg Forum — in combination with the use of airdropping via their 
smartphones to exchange information, enabled them to carve out spaces 
of anonymity and to set up encoded channels of communication in the 
digital realm to match their strategies in physical space.27 

The working principles and the effectiveness of the social media 
platforms enabled self-organization without de-fined leadership through 
real-time aggregation and communication of individual initiative. This 
corresponds to jianghu as an anarchic, dynamic space, in which individuals 
act alone or in alliances yet without any hierarchical order of command. It 



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constitutes a parallel realm that stands in opposition 
to an established societal order and at the same time 
evades the grip of its control.

The Emergence of Contemporary Jianghu in Hong Kong
In times of normality, jianghu exists in films 

and novels in Chinese culture. In times of crisis 
and political change, this concept can transform 
actual spaces into versions of jianghu and to create 
a mental space for retreat from, reflection on, re-
projection of, and potentially the overturning of the 
status quo. 

What we witnessed in 2019 in Hong Kong was 
the emergence of a contemporary form of jianghu, 
as a hybridization of digital space, material space, 
and spatial practices. In absence of any certainty or 
promising outlook in the face of the expiry date of 
Hong Kong’s status as Special Administration in 
2047 and following a severe loss of trust in their 
government to uphold and defend the rights of 
Hong Kong citizens stipulated in the Basic Law, 
the radical branch of Hong Kong protesters took 
a momentous step to withdraw themselves from 
the established order and governmental care to 
fight for their own vision of political justice. In line 
with literary accounts of jianghu, they produced a 
new space of action through their own codes and 
tactics, a parallel world of alternative rules and 
negotiation of power.28 They radically transformed 
the space of the city to form the backdrop for their 
actions and to match their change in conduct. In 
the ever-increasing escalation of the confrontation 
between protesters and police the city had turned 
into a smoking chaos. By late fall 2019 the 
government had fully withdrawn the extradition 
bill, though this delayed move failed to generate a 
substantial sense of resolve. By that time, jianghu 
had fully unfolded in the territory and in the 
temper of its young adult generation. Clemens von 
Haselberg describes jianghu as a parallel world, as 
a counterpart to the “public” world of officialdom, 

Hong Kong’s 
unique 

morphology 
and density 

significantly 
contributed to 
the formation 

as well as 
the increase in 

intensity of this 
confrontation 

and juxtaposition 
of the ordered 
and the unruly, 
the hidden and 

the visible. 

“

”



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but also as its mirror.29 The protests aggressively confronted the Hong 
Kong government, expressing deep dissatisfaction and distrust. At the 
same time, the sudden cutting of ties with conformist behavior by its 
youth and their metamorphosis into radical subjects throwing themselves 
into a fight against an intricate conglomerate of forces plainly exposed the 
impracticality of the very foundations that the “Special Administration” is 
built upon—the political agreements that grant it a controlled autonomy 
with an expiry date.

The full ramifications of the emergence of jianghu in contemporary 
Hong Kong remain to be seen. The Hong Kong government’s hardened 
response to the unrest and the imposing of a new National Security Law 
by Beijing would have only amplified the lingering dissent. Meanwhile the 
movement has been brought to a halt by the global pandemic, and for now 
the streets of Hong Kong are muted by restrictive measures in the name 
of public health.

Whatever the consequences of these events will be, the emergence of 
jianghu in Hong Kong’s urban space demonstrates that a meaningful 
connection exists between cultural conceptions and spatial practices. This 
interrelation alters both the formation as well as our perception of collective 
life in cities and modifies the notion of what is normatively described as 
“public space.” Our discussion of the form and functions of shared urban 
spaces can be much enriched if we are able to introduce place-specific 
cultural conceptions and spatial practices in our understanding of different 
cities around the world.  

Endnotes
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1998 [1958]), 24.
2. Ibid., 28ff.
3. Li Shiqiao, Understanding the Chinese City (Los Angeles: Sage 

Publications, 2014), 98ff.
4. Zhao Tinyang, All Under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World 

Order (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 67.
5. Ibid., 62.
6. Zhuangzi, and Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 80.
7. Murray N. Rothbard, ‘Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social 

Change Towards Laissez Faire’, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol.
IX, No.2 (Fall 1990).

8. Shi Nai’an, The Water Margin. Outlaws of the Marsh. The Classic Chinese 
Novel (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2010).



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9. Clemens von Haselberg, Erzählen von China: 
Genrespezifische Identitätskonstruktionen im 
Wuxia Film (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2019), 69.

10. ‘Number of private cars per one thousand 
population in Hong Kong from 2009 to 
2019,’ Statista, https://www.statista.com/
statistics/960015/hong-kong-private-cars-per-
1000-population/ (accessed June 28, 2021).

11. Li, Understanding the Chinese City, 113-114.
12. Global ranking 11 in 2020, according to the 2021 

STC Safety Index. https://globalresidenceindex.
com/hnwi-index/safety-index/ (accessed June 
28, 2021).

13. Peter J. Hutchings, ‘Freedom of Speech in 
Hong Kong & the Problem of “China”.’ Cardozo 
Studies in Law and Literature Vol.8, No.2 (1996), 
267–75.

14. Article 5, The Basic Law of the Hong Kong 
Special Administrative Region of the People’s 
Republic of China, effective as of 1 July 1997, 
https://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclaw/
chapter1.html (accessed August 25, 2022). 

15. Article 45, The Basic Law of the Hong Kong 
Special Administrative Region of the People’s 
Republic of China, effective as of 1 July 1997, 
https://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclaw/
chapter4.html (accessed June 24, 2021).

16. Amy Gunia, ‘A Brief History of Protest in Post-
Handover Hong Kong,’ Time Magazine, 20 June 
2019, https://time.com/5606212/hong-kong-
history-mass-demonstrations-protest/ (accessed 
June 28, 2021).

17. 2019 population in Hong Kong: 7.52 million, 
data retrieved from: ‘Population Estimates – 
Table 1A: Population by Sex and Age Group’, 
Census and Statistics Department, https://
www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/web_table.html?id=1A, 
(accessed June 30, 2021). 

18. Emma Graham-Harrison and Verna Yu, ‘Hong 
Kong leader suspends extradition bill amid 
protest pressure,’ The Guardian, 15 June 2019, 



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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/15/hong-kong-leader-
carrie-lam-extradition-bill-delay-protests-china (accessed June 30, 
2021).

19. Associated Press, ‘Hong Kong Extradition Law: A Timeline of Events 
That Led to the Current Mass Protests.’ Young Post, South China Morning 
Post, 12 June 2019, https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/news/hong-
kong/article/3055149/hong-kong-extradition-law-timeline-events-led-
current (accessed August 31, 2022).

20. Martin Purbrick, ‘A Report of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests’, Asian 
Affairs, Vol.50, No.4 (2019), 465-487.

21. Heike Holbig, ‘Be Water, My Friend: Hong Kong’s 2019 Anti-
Extradition Protests.’ International Journal of Sociology, Vol.50, No.4 
(2020), 325–37.

22. Tom Lassetter, ‘Revolution 101: The Hardened Teens of the Hong 
Kong Protests,’ Reuters, 13 December 2019, https://www.reuters.com/
investigates/special-report/hongkong-protests-radical/ (accessed August 
30, 2022).

23. Guardian reporter, ‘Mini Stonehenges: Hong Kong Protesters Take on 
Police, One Brick at a Time.’ The Guardian, 15 November 2019, sec. 
World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/15/mini-
stonehenges-hong-kong-protesters-take-on-police-one-brick-at-a-time 
(accessed July 3, 2021)

24. Robert Chard, ‘Review of Review of Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain, 
by Jin Yong and Olivia Mok.’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and 
African Studies, University of London Vol.59, No.3 (1996), 606–607.

25. “Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put 
water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put it into a teapot, it becomes 
the teapot. Now water can flow, or creep, or drip, or crash. Be water, my 
friend.” quoted from: Don McDougall, ‘The Way of the Intercepting 
Fist.’ Longstreet, Season 1, Episode 1, Paramount Television, Edling 
Productions, Corsican Productions, 1971.

26. Jamil Anderlini, ‘Hong Kong’s ‘Water Revolution’ Spins out of 
Control.’ Financial Times, September 2, 2019. https://www.ft.com/
content/d1f60a3a-cd58-11e9-b018-ca4456540ea6 (accessed August 
30, 2022).

27. Yong Ming Kow, Bonnie Nardi, and Wai Kuen Cheng. ‘Be Water: 
Technologies in the Leaderless Anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong.’ 
Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing 
Systems. Honolulu HI USA: AC (2020), 1–12. 

28. Haselberg, Erzählen von China, 70.
29. Ibid., 70. 



introduction
Contemporary architectural practice increasingly 

makes use of technology for the design and 
creation of buildings and environments. While 
many architects see computer aided design as a 
drawing tool, others embrace parametric design 
ideologically, and propose it as a theory and 
method which can offer architectural solutions 
even in complex urban landscapes. Following a 
competition, the refurbishment of Eleftheria Square 
in Nicosia was awarded to the office of Zaha Hadid 
Architects (ZHA), one of the major offices that 
takes parametric design ideologically. The choice of 
Hadid’s proposal proved a major controversy among 
the local population from the announcement of 
the competition results in 2005 to the square’s 
completion in 2020. The discussion focuses mainly 
on the aesthetic appropriateness of the proposal 
imposed on the historical context, (especially 
its proximity to the Venetian fortifications and 
the old town) despite the fact that such an urban 
intervention encompasses many more issues: 
memory and historicity, society, politics, culture, 
and aesthetics, as well as design methodology.

In this article, I attempt a hermeneutical approach 
for examining the ZHA proposal for the square, 
in order to see it from various perspectives and 
understand its significance in relation to its cultural 
context. I will start with examining the history of 
the site, offering an interpretation of  the meaning it 
had for the local population, as a topos in the public 
realm. After investigating the main requirements 
of the competition, I will assess the reception of 
the project and the dominant arguments used in 

Parametric Design in the Historic 
Urban Domain. The Case of Eleftheria 
Square by Zaha Hadid Architects

Stella Evangelidou



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ou Fig.1: Map of Nicosia by 
Giovanni Francesco Camocio, 
(ca. 1570 AD) 

Fig.2: Giulio Savorgnano, 
Nicosia fortifications (1567).

Colonial openings

Fig.3: Map of Nicosia. 
Elefhteria Square, 
Competition brief (2005)

Fig.4: a Celebration at 
Eleftheria Square (1952)



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the local discussions. In an attempt to understand 
the architects’ methodological approach, I will 
explain their design approach, as evident in their 
theoretical engagement with parametric design. To 
contextualize their approach, I also will investigate 
the opposing views of others on such practices. 

Through a hermeneutical approach, and 
by using a theoretical discourse ranging from 
philosophers Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault 
to architectural theorist Alberto Pérez-Gómez, I 
will relate the project to broader concerns on topics 
such as place and meaning, the contemporary 
public realm, the issue of attunement, parametric 
design, and the socio-political implications of a 
particular morphology in historical settings. I also 
will explore how the project, as it has been built, is 
used by residents of and tourists visiting Nicosia. 
It raises questions about architecture’s ethical role 
and impact on society in the era of globalization. 
Through this examination, the Eleftheria Square 
project in Nicosia can be seen as a case study in the 
promise and pitfalls of employing parametric design 
in the historic urban domain.

Historical background—The site as topos
Even though Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, 

has never been designed as an Ideal City, [fig.1] 
its fortifications were a model of Renaissance 
engineering meant to be improved upon and 
replicated in ideal cities elsewhere within the 
Republic of Venice. Designed by the military 
engineer Giulio Savorgnano in 1567, the walls were 
still incomplete three years later when the town was 
besieged by the Ottomans. Yet they still remain 
largely intact to this day. When the old town started 
expanding beyond its limits in the late-nineteenth 
century, the British colonial government created 
openings [fig.2] through the Venetian walls in the 
form of bridges or roads, in order to connect it with 
the new suburbs. Two of these openings were wider 
than the others. Even though they were bridges over 



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a moat, they functioned as collective spaces. One acquired the function 
of a bus terminal, whereas the other functioned as a gathering space in 
the form of a square. This certainly occurred due to its location: it is an 
extension of the historical commercial main street, connected to a long 
avenue that leads out of the city. The square moreover is adjacent to the 
bastion where until recently the City Hall was located. 

As a result of political hostilities between Turks and Greeks on the 
island, a buffer zone has been erected, first in 1963 and then in 1974, 
that divides Nicosia into  northern and southern parts. Thus, while the 
historical city center, with its gothic cathedral and piazza, remained within 
the limits of the Turkish occupied territory in the north, the square was 
appropriated by the Greek citizens as the city’s main square in the south. 
[fig.3] As such, it developed strong socio-political qualities, and became 
a place where spontaneous demonstrations and celebrations would take 
place. The bastion, being at a higher level, acted many times as a stage 
enabling direct contact between the organizers or politicians above and the 
people in the square below. [fig.4] Occasionally, the municipality would 
organize festivals, during which this urban setting would function as an 
open-air concert hall. 

Associated with such communal events, the square was then renamed 
“Eleftheria”,  which is the Greek word for freedom.1 It has been, therefore, 
a topos in both a phenomenological as well as in a political sense. It was 
a topos in the phenomenological sense of the Genius Loci, as defined by 
Christian Norberg-Schulz: a place which can be determined by its physical 
characteristics, and yet is more than that. A topos is defined as an existential 
space that carries intangible qualities which can only be experienced, 
rather than be determined by geometry and matter. In the case of man-
made places, the qualities of a topos encompass the way a group of people 
draws on both its own virtues and the virtues of the space in which it is 
settled, thus acting and developing a degree of collective consciousness. 
Places where people have such a relationship with their built environment 
conjure up a sense of belonging. Consequently, such a place holds both the 
life of the people and the aura of the several historical layers, which reflect 
its special character and its own distinct spirit, its Genius Loci.2 Since their 
construction, the Nicosia city walls have endured Venetian domination, 
Ottoman and British rule, the country’s independence, and the Turkish 
invasion, but also the spirit of the people in social struggle and rejoicing. 

In addition to its metaphysical qualities, the socio-political activities 
that took place on the square gave it qualities that defined it as a topos 
politikos. According to Hannah Arendt, the life of the polis is possible 
through such activities of common action (praxis) in the public realm, 



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which is the common world that gathers us 
together. Arendt relates public space to the space 
of appearances, that is, face-to-face human 
interactions. Appearance is a revelation of oneself, 
of one’s position and essence, to others. However, as 
Seyla Benhabib explains, the public realm is a place 
where self-interest is transformed into a common 
public goal that transcends the boundaries of face-
to-face society.3 It is the presence of others, that see 
and hear from different positions), and demanding 
something in common with others to be more 
permanent than our earthly lives, which assures 
us of the reality of both the world and ourselves. 
Our perception of reality, Arendt argues, depends 
upon the phenomenality which takes place in the 
public realm. Consequently, our sense of our own 
existence depends on it. 

The public realm is thus a political place where 
the life of praxis (vita activa) becomes a political 
life (vios politikos). Arendt considers praxis as the 
highest and most important level of active life. 
As a political action, praxis is the true realization 
of human freedom. Topos politikos transcends the 
lifespan of one generation, and thus transforms 
itself into a place of potential earthly immortality.4 
Eleftheria Square has been the public realm of 
the polis where its citizens, for generations, would 
gather in order to participate in a democratic 
expression of their collective concerns. It was, in 
this way, an intersubjective space which bonded, 
but also differentiated, the members of the society 
in the democratic manifestation in the polis. It 
was through actions marked by their essence of 
democracy and plurality that the topos gained, in 
turn, its existential quality. 

The competition for a new city square and the reception 
of the winning scheme 
In 2005, the Nicosia municipality announced a 

competition for a new “bridge-square.” The main 
challenges of the requirements, as given in the 

The public 
realm is a 

place where 
self-interest 

is transformed 
into a common 

public goal that 
transcends the 

boundaries of 
face-to-face 

society

“

”



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competition brief, were: i) to respect the monument of the Venetian walls, 
by following the international conventions and the local legislation on 
antiquities; ii) to design a permanent, two-lane bridge for vehicular traffic; 
iii) to provide a public space that would allow social interaction during 
all seasonal climatic conditions; iv) to pay attention to the materials and 
details, to propose street furniture as well as new programmatic uses; v) the 
proposed construction and materials had to allow reversibility, since only 
the bridge for vehicles would be permanent, whereas part of the square 
was to be demolished in the future after the construction of a new public 
square, in a new refurbished area outside the walls. [fig.3] As stated before, 
the competition was won by Zaha Hadid Architects, with a proposal 
which caused intense controversy between the citizens during and after 
the realization of the project. [fig.5.] According to the description of the 
office’s website, the design of Eleftheria Square represents a “historically 
significant architectural intervention” which aspires to reconnect the old 

Fig.5: Zaha Hadid Architects, 
Eleftheria Square and moat 
park, Nicosia (2010-21)

Fig.6: Zaha Hadid Architects, 
Eleftheria Square and moat 
park, Nicosia (2010-21). The 
“dish.” View from the moat



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fortified town with the modern city, by means of a 
“bold vision of coherence and continuity.” The level 
of the square, which the architects call “the dish,” 
has a slight upward inclination toward the moat, so 
as to act as an amphitheater addressing the bastion 
[fig.6], and in order to create a dialogue between 
the old and the new, as the office’s representative 
explained in an interview.5 

According to the same representative, the main 
structural novelty that was to be introduced was 
the unorthodox shape of the columns resting on 
the moat, with a thin tip and opening to a wide 
diameter at the top. This design was a solution to the 
problem of excavating into the moat and disturbing 
the historical layers beneath. He added that the 
innovative design and construction technique at 
such a scale was possible only due to parametric 
design, the method first applied in the Phaeno 
Science Centre, which ZHA had just completed in 
Germany. Apart from the information shared above, 
there is no other information recorded regarding 
the architects’ concept and intentions for the form 
chosen for the specific project and its integration 
with the existing urban fabric. The Eleftheria 
Square project was nominated by a local jury for the 
Mies van der Rohe Awards which, as an institution, 
demands architecture to respond to vernacular, 
traditional, cultural, and natural elements. The 
views of the supporters of the project, engaged in 
the local debate, is well summarized in the jury’s 
accompanying supportive essay from the local 
committee, which interprets the upward lifting of 
“the dish” as a symbolic gesture toward the future, 
and its circular geometry, which embraces the 
bastion, as a reference to the past. The essay regards 
the lower level of the moat as “a secret garden” with 
its own microclimate and distinct spatial qualities. 
The jury further praised the aesthetic quality of the 
details and the secret garden, which give to the overall 
project an artistic value which is accompanied with 
spatial experiences and promenades. In such a way, 



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it concludes, the project not only “re-establishes the area as a gateway to 
the old city, but also as a unique destination in itself.”6

On the other side, the opponents of the project criticize the Hadid 
scheme firstly for the way it visually clashes with the monument of the 
Venetian walls “through its scale and materials.” They claim that the 
Venetian walls function at the level of the intimate and the familiar, despite 
their monumentality, because of the earthy quality of the sandstone, which 
is also used extensively in the buildings of the old city with the narrow 
streets. [fig.7-8] The color and texture of the sandstone is in contrast to 
the coldness of the marble and the gray and white concrete of the new 
square. [fig.9] They perceive the new square as massive and monolithic, 
whereas the Venetian walls and the old town consist of small units and 
intimate spaces that relate to the human scale.7 The materials used for 
Hadid’s square, in conjunction with the hyper-aestheticized forms and 
sophisticated details, have been considered as alien to the locals’ sense of 
aesthetics and habits. 

The lack of consideration for the local climatic conditions is another 
issue. Cyprus is sunny most of the year, whereas Nicosia, being at the 
center of the island, is exposed to high temperatures that, in the summer, 
can sometimes exceed 40oC. Indifference to the microclimate of Nicosia 
prohibits people from gathering in the square for at least half the year. 
The unsuitability of the public square to the weather conditions limits 
public encounters due to the reflective materials and lack of shade. In 
addition, this criticism focuses on the fact that the proposed scheme failed 
to respond to the basic programmatic requirements of the competition, 
since the construction materials didn’t seem to be reversible, there was no 

Fig.7: Materiality and scale 
in the old town: Nicosia 
within the Venetian walls..

Fig.8: Materiality and scale 
in the old town: Nicosia 
within the Venetian walls..



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vehicular bridge, and no furnishings were proposed, 
while compliance with the Antiquities Law was 
disputed. It is also important to note that the design 
at the moat level was not part of the competition, 
but a later commission added to the project.

Although the square garnered praise for its 
formal qualities, the negative criticism weighs more 
on its human utility. The anthropocentric concern 
examines the metaphysical quality of the character 
and sense of the place, as well as the relation between 
its social and urban aspects, on the phenomenological 
dimension. From this short analysis of the scheme, 
one can conclude that issues such as materiality, 
historical layering, climate, local habits, and ways 
of socializing and using public space were given 
little consideration during the design of the new 
Eleftheria square by the winning office. The debate, 
which took place in the local press and across social 
media, was often accompanied with both caustic 
and ironic remarks directed toward the architect 
and the mayor, who were seen as indifferent elites, 
distant from the operation of the “real world.” Such 
criticism was related to the extensive time required 
for the project to be completed, due to the many 
delays caused by conflicts between the architect, the 
municipality, and the contractors, which, in turn, 
caused an increase in cost and the disruption of the 
city center.

Related theoretical discourses 
In the absence of more information from ZHA 

regarding the concept behind Eleftheria Square, 
examination of the theoretical discourse which 
constitutes the background of their work is our only 
option for understanding the designers’ thought 
process. Concurrently, an examination of other 
theoretical discourses concerning new architecture 
in historic and sensitive environments can inform a 
critical perspective on the subject.  

The reference to, and influence of, the Russian 
avant-garde on Zaha Hadid’s work since her 



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student years has been discussed and analyzed by many theorists and 
critics. Reflecting on her early paintings, Hadid confirmed her interest 
in the concept of fragmentation, abstraction, and explosion, as well as 
in deconstructing ideas of repetitiveness and mass production, which 
constitute the characteristics of modern architecture. According to ZHA’s 
website, “for Hadid, painting was a design tool, and abstraction was an 
investigative structure for imagining architecture and its relationships to 
the world we live in.” “Her paintings,” it continues, “were conceived as 
a manifesto of a utopian world,” and “prefigure the potential of digital 
processes,” which explains why “technology and innovation have always 
been central to the work of the office”.8

Her collaboration with Patrik Schumacher in 1988, whose work 
in parametric design complemented Hadid’s approach, enabled the 
realization of their stylistic projects, and achieved both technological and 
structural breakthroughs. Schumacher’s perspective, as explained in his 
massive theoretical books Parametricism as Style—Parametricism Manifesto 
20089 and The Autopoiesis of Architecture,10 offer insight into the ZHA 
approach to architecture. In both works, Schumacher claims that today’s 
architecture has difficulty addressing the complexity of contemporary 
cities and societies, and therefore needs to reassert its methods. He sees an 
“inability in modernism and deconstructivism to form a new sustainable 
view.” Therefore, he highlights the need to discover a new comprehensive 
theoretical system which can describe architecture from within its own 
internal constitution.11 

Since architecture, according to Schumacher, cannot exist without 
theory, all buildings before Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), the first 
architect offering a theory of architecture, fall into the category of tradition. 
Schumacher asserts that each previous style in history constitutes a new 
research paradigm defeating its predecessor. Therefore, the “history of 

Fig.9: Zaha Hadid Architects, 
Eleftheria Square, The 
level of the square.



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architecture can be thought of in terms of cycles 
of innovation and shifts between revolutionary 
periods.”12 Parametricism is thus, according to 
him, the style of our times, because it is considered 
the architectural avant-garde of the technological 
era and, in addition, it can explain architecture 
itself as a distinct, autonomous network of 
communications. The “autopoiesis” of architecture 
is architecture’s ability for self-production. This 
is based on a theory that focuses on architectural 
communication that observes and analyzes how 
individual communications depend upon, and 
reproduce structures such as concepts, values, styles 
and methods. Communications are the drawings, 
texts, and built works, whereas built works are 
the set of reference points within the network of 
architectural communications. 

Conceived as a scientific theory about architecture 
from “within architecture,” it is promoted as the “end 
of architectural theories.” Reflecting architecture’s 
evolving patterns of communication in relation to 
the societal domain, the autopoiesis of architecture 
and parametricism do not communicate with 
straight lines and platonic solids as they did in 
the past, nor with typologies, zones, or territories. 
Instead, the theory involves working with primitives 
such as “splines, blobs, nurds, and particles” 
organized by scripts, as well as by “gradient fields 
of activity and variable social scenarios calibrated 
with various event parameters.” Since architectural 
elements have become so malleable through 
parametricism, one can ask for further softening, 
further differentiation, correlation, script, and so 
on.13 In this method, there is a cross-connectedness 
which, unlike phenomenology, always depends on 
computer data. 

Schumacher suggests that “parametricism” could 
introduce new ideas to the architectural scene. 
To him, it “can be summarized in the slogan” of 
importing an “architectural and urban repertoire 
that is geared up to create complex, polycentric 

Schumacher 
claims that 

today’s 
architecture 

has difficulty 
addressing the 
complexity of 

contemporary 
cities and 

societies, and 
therefore needs 

to reassert its 
methods.

“

”



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urban and architectural fields which are densely layered and continuously 
differentiated.” Style, buildings, and cities are described in terms of 
liquidity, flow, void, openness, and complexity, and their compliance to the 
tools of parametric design.14 The images in the Parametricism Manifesto are 
related to Hadid’s utopian painting, London 2066 and many others.15 The 
“active shake” of the city occurs by using similar parameters to large scale 
projects where open spaces, streets, railway lines, and water networks are 
redefined in new relationships and new possibilities in urban experiments. 

The theoretical ground expressed in Hadid’s paintings and Schumacher’s 
manifesto share similar and intense formalistic elements and fluidity with 
ZHA’s architectural projects built all over the world. Despite the location 
or country in which they are built, these projects look alike, having 
similar forms and even photorealistic renderings from the conceptual to 
the final construction stage. At the same time, the language and notions 
Schumacher uses to describe this methodology are hardly intelligible 
for people unfamiliar with the technological aspect of digital design. 
Nevertheless, these notions are expected to be understood, at least by 
the younger generations, since this method is well established in the 
educational program of architecture schools. Nonetheless, this language 
is far removed from any previous form of architectural production and 
representation, which remains haptic; it might instead sound more like a 
technical description of the inside functioning of a machine, rather than 
one regarding the “insides of architecture,” as Schumacher claims. 

At the opposite end of the argument about the place of science and 
technology in human life, many twentieth-century theorists have spoken 
of its negative course, beginning with the shift in consciousness that 
occurred after Descartes and Galileo. Amongst them, the architectural 
theorist Alberto Pérez-Gómez further explains the shift that occurred 
in the architectural field. In his latest work, Attunement: Architectural 
Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science, he argues that topos, as a 
qualitative experiential site, was substituted by geometric space, since 
Galileo and Descartes saw the universe as a homogeneous geometric 
void in which all bodies were described by the same mathematical laws. 
It was under the influence of such epistemological thinking that Claude 
Perrault (1613-1688) came to understand architectural representation as a 
systematized set of sections, along with Cartesian planes.16 A century later, 
according to Pérez-Gómez, Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) 
believed that architectural meaning was dependent only on the efficient, 
mechanical understanding of structure and cost-effective use of materials. 
For him, architecture was essentially a social need for a functional shelter. 
Durand implemented sophisticated tools of representation for producing 



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innovative work that was unresponsive to its 
cultural context. He preferred strictly instrumental 
design mechanisms, with the belief that architecture 
is the objective space of Cartesian geometry. Thus, 
a “building” meant its use, and any emotion 
was beyond its scope. By the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, it was a common assumption 
among architects that architectural space could be 
easily represented through descriptive geometry and 
axonometric projection based on visual attributes. 
This, Pérez-Gómez argues, neglected the emotional 
aspects and qualities experienced in a real, physical, 
and transcendental space.17 

This translates, today, to the production of 
digital space and fashionable innovations through 
architectural software. Pérez-Gómez, therefore, is 
surprised by neither Schumacher’s ideas presented 
in Autopoiesis nor the popular desire for “intelligent” 
buildings with “computerized minds” for adjusting 
to our comfort. He claims that as long as the use 
of technology enhances telecommunication devices 
and production techniques, our own sensory and 
perceptual abilities will be diminished. And since 
our urban environments emerge from this method 
of production, which reduces space to a set of 
coordinates, they remain devoid of qualities which 
involve all our senses. For Pérez-Gómez, the crisis of 
modern science and architecture consists of the fact 
that parametric strategies and tools generate forms 
and novel buildings that fail to propose meaningful, 
attuned environments for human culture. In this 
way they “exacerbate our sense of despair in view of 
the meaninglessness of existence.”18 

Further, such novel structures are in line with 
strategies for the commodification of architecture 
within the contemporary neoliberal political 
spectrum. The art critic Hal Foster offers an 
explanation of the process, which is aided by high-
tech materials and electronic manipulations in 
order to become signs and symbols. He claims that 
the structure and the program are distorted in a way 

For Pérez-
Gómez, the crisis 

of modern science 
and architecture 
“exacerbate our 
sense of despair 

in view of the 
meaninglessness 

of existence.”

“

”



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to achieve a sculptural monumental effect which, at times, has a scale that 
dominates the landscape. Formal expression is stressed, above all, in order 
to impress, while behind the rhetorical façades there are, many times, 
conventional interiors. Thus, the form of the building serves as “a sign that 
overwhelms the context.” According to Foster, this is a winning populist 
formula with the signature of a star-architect, which serves the marketing 
policies of “museums, companies, cities, and other corporate entities that 
want to be perceived, through instant icons, as global players.”19  

Eleftheria Square fulfills Foster’s description. Moreover, since the 
mayors and municipality officials have used the name of the architect and 
the design as a branding tool to promote the square as a tourist attraction, 
in order to raise the city’s economy and status. The language of the project 
coincides with that of city branding policies which turn a location into a 
destination, while at the same time rejecting its own historicity and the 
meaning of the place. Topos, in this case, becomes spectacle. In such a way, 
architecture turns into an image that serves more the market economy 
than society.  

Architecture as a language and art form is symbolic, and whether it has 
a meaningful presence for its users or not, it has its own meaning within 
the urban context. From the point of view of philosopher Hans Georg 
Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutics, new architecture in a historic setting 
can generate multiple interpretations, which are constantly regulated by 
what a setting has been in the past, and what it wants to be, by means of 
the architecture of the new intervention. These interpretations might fall 
into the realm of prejudices. Prejudices for Gadamer are the pre-conditions 
of understanding. In the case of new architecture in old settings, we 
distinguish blind prejudices from productive prejudices only through a 
dialogical encounter with the past as a whole. Life, says Gadamer, is the 
dialogue between past and present. It is through this dialogue that we can 
define our living values and give meaning to our lives and surroundings.20 

To understand the past is a necessary metaphysical basis for life. The 
context for the new architecture relates to people’s understanding of 
their setting. Yet the relation to the architecture of the past goes beyond 
the historical period of which people have knowledge.21 Gadamer talks 
about the harmony of all details, with the whole as a criterion for this 
understanding. Failure to achieve harmony means that the understanding 
has failed. How do we, then, understand the past? For Gadamer, it is a 
process of holistic experiences. Understanding tradition is an essential 
element to understanding existence. This understanding also takes place 
on visual and tangible grounds, such as materials, construction techniques, 
texture, colors, spatial disposition, and volumetric articulation.22 In such 



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a way, Gadamer offers an analysis of the tangible 
qualities of the Genius Loci.

From a similar perspective, Pérez-Gómez 
discusses how, for centuries, the European city 
functioned as a theater of complex and diverse 
atmospheres. He explains “atmospheres” as 
the character, mood, and ambience of a place 
apprehended by all the senses. Atmospheres result 
from both natural and manmade spaces. Besides 
their materials and details, they include smells, 
sounds, and habits. These constitute an aesthetic 
experience which is multisensory and emotional, 
and cannot be reduced to distant “pictorial” forms. 
If architecture, he claims, does not aim to deal 
with local cultures, the lives of people, their habits, 
places, stories, and history, it will remain detached 
and contextually alien.23 

With the term attunement, Pérez-Gómez calls for 
an architecture that is attuned to its location and 
its inhabitants, and can thus enhance our human 
values and capacities. Architecture remains in crisis, 
he states, as long as its social relevance is lost to 
formal innovation and algorithmic parameters that 
determine the physical environment, while ignoring 
the meaning of places. The meaning of places rests 
in the poetics of materials and cultural values. He 
argues that the understanding of its meaning is 
possible when architecture is engaged in a dialogical 
process between present and past, when it operates 
as a communicative setting for societies. By 
understanding its meaning, which is a constituent 
part of our consciousness, we are engaged with 
the spiritual dimension of life and a process of 
self-understanding. Pérez-Gómez delves into an 
existential reflection on the meaning of life, which 
is inextricably linked to the meaning of architecture. 
He thus poses a question for the ethical dimension 
of architecture and its service to society. To be fully 
self-aware, he claims, participation in an external 
environment replete with meanings and emotions 
is necessary. Such transformative atmospheres bring 

to understand 
the past is a 

necessary 
metaphysical 
basis for life

“
”



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productive change. Attuned architecture permits people to be attuned to 
their worldly actions and habits.24 

 
The “actual world” - the current use of the Square 
If we consider Gadamer’s and Pérez-Gómez’s hermeneutical approach 

valid, it is obvious that the parametric methodology used for Eleftheria 
Square did not make sufficient consideration for either history, meaning or 
attunement. However, an integrated view of the Eleftheria Square project 

Fig.10: Zaha Hadid Architects, 
Eleftheria Square. Occasional 
concerts under the square

Fig.11: Zaha Hadid Architects, 
Eleftheria Square. Late after-
noon (2022)

Fig.12: Zaha Hadid Architects, 
Eleftheria Square. Moat level, 
weekends in late afternoon 
(2022)



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is not possible without considering the way it is 
now being used, including its complementary part 
on the adjacent moat level. A few months after its 
completion, the first event organized on the square 
celebrated a political anniversary. This was the first 
and last collective event of any character to take 
place on the square, according to the municipality’s 
records. After that, the municipality moved all events 
below the square, on the moat level. Since then, on 
the lower level underneath the square there have 
been many events of various, other than political, 
character. [fig.10] Some uses that were overlooked 
by ZHA in its design, but deemed by the city council 
appropriate for the moat park, were designed by the 
municipality, such as a small amphitheater and a 
playground, which appropriated some edges of the 
park.    

The level of the square functions, mainly, as a 
pedestrian passage-way between the new and the 
old walled city. During the day, it is usually deserted, 
especially due to the intense sunshine, [fig.9] but 
also because it provides no other uses. On weekend 
nights and afternoons, however, the square attracts 
many people from the migrant (Asian and African) 
community working in Nicosia. [fig.11] The same 
occurs during weekends, at the level of the moat, 
which is overrun by migrants taking selfies. [fig.12] 
These are, perhaps, the most vibrant moments of the 
square and the moat park, since the locals, who don’t 
hang out on the square, usually leave immediately 
after visiting for an event at the moat-park. Besides 
the locals who visited the site when it opened, and 
despite the attractive drone photos advertising 
the site taken by the municipality, [fig.5] it seems 
that it is not a destination for them. Likewise at 
the moat level, although there is an attractive park 
with fountains, lawns and tree clumps, located on 
floral-pattern concrete paving—all shapes ordered 
by parametric design.

 These observations lead to the question of 
why the site cannot become a pluralistic collective 



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space of exchange and meaning for all. Would it be valid to suggest that 
this might be due to its strong character of a pleasure garden that caters 
only to visual pleasure, in conjunction with the diminishing importance 
of the Venetian walls as a mute backdrop to the irrelevant scenery in 
front of it? The deserted appearance of the square during the day turns it 
into a dystopia, whereas the project’s site as a whole can be defined as a 
heterotopia. Michel Foucault, in his work Of Other Spaces, defines a utopia 
to be an ideal place of a perfect yet unreal society in bliss and describes 
heterotopias as the real places that have strayed from what is considered 
“normal” and are approaching the “other.”25 Both the square and the moat 
below fit Foucault’s description of heterotopias of the transitory, as well 
as of the two extreme types of heterotopia, of illusion and compensation, 
respectively. A heterotopia of the transitory is a place absolutely temporal, 
disoriented from the eternal, and where time is fleeting, like in a festival. 
In a heterotopia of illusion we encounter informal, outside of “the normal” 
social activities in an illusory space which exposes the rationality of the 
adjacent space. A heterotopia of compensation, according to Foucault’s 
terminology, fits his example of the “colonies:” a perfectly organized space 
that leaves its mark in the culture, which aims to be an ideal model of 
organization to which we all must adapt.26 

Conclusion 
Eleftheria Square, as an integral part of the Venetian walls, connecting 

the old city with the new, the city’s history and its memory, carried a 
profound meaning for the inhabitants of Nicosia that can be understood 
and defined by the notion of topos. The discussion and controversy regarding 
the refurbished Eleftheria Square will, perhaps, continue for many years, 
given its importance to the city. This is so because of its central location as 
well as its historicity, its continuous cost of maintenance and surveillance, 
and its function as a public domain in flux in an emerging multicultural 
city. Besides its specificity, the project can be seen as a case study for new 
projects in historic urban environments designed via a similar parametric 
approach.

Reviewing the examination of the project, one could say that several 
considerations arise regarding the role of architecture in society. On the 
one hand, there are issues regarding the more technical aspect of the 
production of architecture and its management. On the other, there 
are issues related to its humanitarian and spiritual roles. In both cases, 
the core issue is ethical, and concerns those to whom architecture bears 
responsibility. Issues related to the responsibility of the competition jury 
to meet the programmatic requirements, the responsibility of municipal 



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authorities when the initial budget is exceeded, the 
management of the schedule, the management of 
taxpayers’ money, the extension of the project’s scale 
without a new tender, and the failure to comply 
with conventions on antiquities, are related to the 
technocratic aspect, but are not insignificant in the 
world of architectural practice. On the contrary, 
they are related to the ethical code of the discipline. 
Even though these issues are not usually heard 
beyond local societies, in our time of globalized 
architecture it is worth studying projects of star-
architecture and how and/or why their execution 
might affect the wellbeing of a society. 

Although the technical aspect is short-term 
and can, eventually, be handled, the actual built 
projects and their consequences are long-term. The 
result of a theoretical and methodological attempt 
based on “parametricism” for a utopian landscape 
that would be “self-produced” and can reproduce 
communication structures, such as concepts and 
values, seems to become, in the Eleftheria Square 
project, a place that segregates society. The public 
realm, according to Arendt’s definition, does 
not emerge automatically because people gather. 
Instead, it occurs when their opinions are openly 
expressed, and their collective goal is manifested 
through actions that are possible due to human 
diversity and agency.27 The hyper-aestheticized and 
non-functional forms have displaced political 
actions from the site. Eleftheria Square has lost its 
quality as a topos politikos. Despite the promise of 
the inclusion of human functions into parametric 
design, it seems that algorithms on a computer 
screen cannot, at least yet, engage peoples’ histories, 
their sites with multiple meanings, their memories, 
or social habits. Instead, while aligned with the 
demands of a marketplace that commodifies 
architecture, “parametricism” results in an aesthetic 
homogenization on its top side, while it is only 
underneath and around its margins that the creation 
of heterotopias such as those at Eleftheria Square; 

The public 
realm does 
not emerge 

automatically 
because people 
gather. Instead, 
it occurs when 

their opinions are 
openly expressed 

and their 
collective goal 

is manifested 
through actions 

that are possible 
due to human 
diversity and 

agency.

“

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heterotopias of the transitory, of illusion, and of compensation. 

If we consider that human consciousness needs external environments 
as vessels for meaning and emotion for its self-awareness, as well as dialogue 
and exchange in a pluralistic environment, these spaces of aesthetic 
homogenization cannot offer the space for a conscious life on the spiritual, 
social, and political level. Since the political is closely associated with 
aesthetic experience, and since at the core of the aesthetic experience is life 
itself, our harmony with our surroundings is an important factor in our 
psychosomatic health. As Pérez-Gómez says, an ethical architecture cannot 
but promote such attunement with our physical places, which are of utmost 
importance for our well-being. Cities with alienating environments cause 
alienation with culture and result in a sense of purposelessness. They are 
sources of malaise, contributing to despair. For when architecture functions 
as a “high-tech drug,” says Pérez-Gómez, it simply provides comfort in 
order to avoid boredom and the reality of death.28 If architecture will 
continue to eliminate spaces that promote human exchange and awareness 
by replacing them with “intelligent” and “spectacular” places that promote 
lethargy, narcissism, and illusion, we will probably need to reconsider its 
role in, and responsibility for, the survival of culture. 

Endnotes
1. After the Second World War, and prior to the name “Eleftheria” 

(Freedom), the square was named after Ioannis Metaxas. He was the 
Greek prime minister who rejected an ultimatum to surrender imposed 
by Italy, committing Greece to the Allies and bringing the country into 
the war against the Nazis and Mussolini. Thus, the square was for many 
decades associated with the “No” of the Greek resistance and passion 
for freedom.  

2. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of 
Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 6–22.

3. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. (Thousand 
Oaks/London/New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996), 200–201.

4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Second Edition) (Chicago: 
The University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), 7, 15, 50–72.  

5.  Σταματίου, Ελίνα. ‘Ο Χρίστος Πασσάς των Zaha Hadid Architects 
αποκαλύπτει τη νέα Πλατεία Ελευθερίας.’ Sell & Build – Scientific 
Construction Magazine, February,27 2011; http://www.sellandbuild.
com/interview/5355 (accessed December 18, 2019).

6. Cyprus Architects Association. Β’ Φάση Κυπριακής Συμμετοχής – EU Mies 
Awards 2022; https://architecture.org.cy/v-fasi-kypriakis-symmetochis-
%e2%88%99-eu-mies-award-2022/ (accessed June 5, 2021).



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7. Στέλλα Ευαγγελίδου, ‘Αρχιτεκτονικός διαγωνισμός 
για την ανάπλαση της πλατείας Ελευθερίας και του 
περιβάλλοντα χώρου.’ O ΠΟΛΙΤΗΣ (Nicosia, 
June 4, 2005).

8. Zaha Hadid Architects. Zaha Hadid: Early paintings 
and drawings at the Serpentine  Sackler Gallery. 
https://www.zaha-hadid.com/2016/12/07/zaha-
hadid-early- paintings-and-drawings/ (accessed 
December 18, 2019).

9. Patrik Schumacher, Parametricism as Style—
Parametricist Manifesto. London. Presented 
and discussed at the Dark Side Club, 
11th Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2008. 
https://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/
Parametricism%20as%20Style.htm (accessed 
December 18, 2019).

10. Patrik Schumacher, Parametricism and the 
Autopoiesis of Architecture. SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, 
September 2010.  https://www.patrikschumacher.
com/Texts/Parametricism%20and%20the%20
Autopoiesis%20of%20Architecture.html 
(accessed August 10, 2022).

11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13.Patrik Schumacher, CAA Annual Lecture 2018, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuW7_f_8-
Qsk&feature=youtu.befbclid=Iw-AR193znJFE
JsaWbZwlvEBs32GdEdk5F2svfqPz8c0ft1BF
Uc WDda1HyGWWQ (accessed December 18, 
2019).

14. Ibid.
15. Zaha Hadid Architects. London 2066, 

https://www.zaha-hadid.com/masterplans/
london-2066/ (accessed December 15, 2019)

16. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement: Architectural 
Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science. 
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016), 
13, 23,119–20.

17. Ibid., 108, 127.
18. Ibid., 119–30, 225.
19. Hal Foster, ‘Image Building,’ in: Anthony 



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Vidler (ed.), Architecture between Spectacle and Use. (Williamstown, 
MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2008), 167, 175. 

20. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 
1986, c1975), 245–53.

21. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Editred by David 
E. Linge). (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 95–96

22. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 259–78.
23. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement, Architectural meaning after the crisis 

of modern science, (University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Department 
of Architecture Lecture Series. Fall 2020) https://www.umass.edu/
architecture/umass-department-architecture-lecture-series-fall-2020-
alberto-p%C3%A9rez-g%C3%B3mez.

24. Pérez-Gómez, Attunement, 216–30.
25. Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ In: Diacritics, 

Vol.16, No.1, (Johns Hopkins University Press, Spring, 1986), 22–27
26. Ibid., 27.
27. Ibid., 198–199.
28. Ibid., 8.



The user’s space is lived—not represented (or 
conceived). [Henri Lefebvre]1

Introduction
A recurring theme in the history of architectural 

and urban theory is the shaping role the built 
environment plays in the everyday lives of its users. 
Perhaps most famously illustrated by Winston 
Churchill’s statement “We shape our buildings, and 
afterwards they shape us,” both theorists as well as 
designers have frequently considered the designed 
environment as playing an active part in society 
and examined the relation between plans on the 
drawing table and their impact on people’s lives 
in reality.2 Although divergent in their outcomes, 
the ambitions of modernists like Le Corbusier, 
structuralists like Herman Hertzberger, and current 
architects who advocate the participation of end-
users in their design processes converge in the belief 
that design can contribute to the production of a 
certain ideal society. 

These same ambitions, however, have also led 
to projects in which people behaved differently 
or even completely opposite to the intentions of 
the designers. The efficiency and functionality 
that were at the basis of early twentieth century 
modernism were later part of the criticism on the 
living-conditions in buildings like Pruitt-Igoe 
in Saint-Louis or the Bijlmer-neighbourhood 
in Amsterdam.3 Alison Smithson expressed her 
disillusionment about the way residents behaved in 
Robin Hood gardens after she and her husband had 
designed it completely around their vision on an 
ideal collective society.4 In less extreme cases as well, 

What Architecture Does. 
An Embodied Approach towards 
the Impact of the Built Environment

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it seems the impact of the built environment is limited. Hope for creating 
an ideal social situation, such as strong communities shaped by collective 
spaces or gardens, often seems vain in retrospect and serve primarily as 
a good story to “sell” the design rather than a proper solution in reality. 
Luckily, the same principle applies vice-versa: even in poorly designed 
buildings, people seem to be quite flexible in making their environments 
work for whatever it is they want to do.

This observation has led some to observe, that the built environment is 
not as influential as designers themselves might like to think. According 
to architect and behavioural researcher Richard Buday for example, 
“environmental determinism’s failure showed leading architecture … 
does not shape behaviour any better than secondary architecture,” and 
therefore one might even wonder if the architect’s profession is at all that 
relevant.5 The belief in this power of the built environment can even be 
dangerous according to Buday, as it neglects to acknowledge the impact of 
people’s own choices.

Regardless of how much or how little impact design has on people, 
we can nevertheless agree that one environment can be experienced as 
more pleasant, lively, beautiful or practical than another, even when such 
judgements might not be universal. Underestimating such impact might 
be just as dangerous as overestimating its power. Instead of trying to 
measure the share that can be ascribed to environmental design, this article 
therefore proposes an alternative route: instead of asking the quantitative 
question of how much impact the environment has on its users, it asks the 
generative question of how such impact arises. The first part of the article 
explores possible answers to this question. The second discusses issues that 
complicate the implementation of this knowledge into the design practice.     

The theories of   such philosophers as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger 
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in the wake of recent developments in the 
fields of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and more specifically 
the research program of embodied embedded cognition, provide insights 
into the strong and dependent relations between the mind, the body and 
the environment.6 Supported by extensive scientific research over the last 
few decades, these insights dismiss a Cartesian view in which an immaterial 
and independent mind can think rationally about the physical world.7      

As many architectural theorists, such as Harry Mallgrave, have shown, 
these insights offer strong potential for understanding architectural 
experience as well.8 Instead of considering subjects as relatively independent 
from the built environment they perceive, we can now understand how 
architectural experience is a physical consequence of the impact a building 
has on its users. To make this assertion clear, we will have a look at what is 



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called the enactive approach to perception, a theory 
that is part of the broader embodied embedded 
cognition movement. As Andrea Jelić, et al. have 
argued, this enactive view provides a particularly 
useful guide to studying architectural experience.9      
Of particular interest is a paper by Evan Thompson 
and Francisco Varela, in which the connections 
between mind, body and world are explained 
as three “dimensions of embodiment,” or three 
different cycles of operation that integrate these 
three components: 

1.  Cycles of organismic regulation of the entire 
body.

2. Cycles of sensorimotor coupling between 
organism and environment.

3. Cycles of intersubjective interaction, involving 
the recognition of the intentional meaning of 
actions and linguistic communication.10

Although it falls beyond the scope of this 
article to describe these kinds of cycles in all their 
biological detail, they do provide an interesting 
framework with which we can explore the ways 
in which architecture influences its users. They 
describe the three levels at which body, brain and 
world are integrated with each other and therefore 
how connections between them are made, which 
provides an overview of how architecture has 
“access” to a human being. 

In the latter part of the article, I will therefore 
consider each dimension separately and explore 
how it relates to the built environment to arrive at 
a tool with which the impact in specific cases can 
be analyzed. Besides this theoretical exploration, a 
specific case-study will be used in order to illustrate 
the theory and relate it to building practice. The 
chosen case-study is the plenary meeting hall of 
the Dutch Parliament, a design that holds a special 
relation to themes of publicity and power. Seating 
the 150 elected members of Parliament, it forms 
the physical realization of Dutch democracy and 
despite being an indoor space, the hall is arguably 



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one of the most public spaces in the country. In the first instance, both 
literally and physically public access to meetings in the hall is ensured at all 
times, overcoming complex issues such as security and wheelchair access.      
But access is ensured virtually as well, as the debates taking place in the 
room are shared through various media on a daily basis. Programmatically 
similar to the British House of Commons Chamber Churchill referred 
to in his famous statement, the impact of the hall’s design is particularly 
relevant, since it may possibly influence policies that concern the entire 
country. It results in interesting relationships between the roles that are 
accommodated and how they have become physical in the design of 
the space, the furniture and other facilities. Drawings of this design will 
provide an illustration of the impact that can be discovered in each cycle.

ORGANISMIC REGULATION
Under organismic regulation we understand those unconscious 

processes that regulate the state of the organism. As Thompson and      
Varela explain, the “main basis is the autonomic nervous system, in 
which sensors and effectors to and from the body link neural processes to 
basic homeodynamic processes of the internal organs and viscera.”11 The 
purpose of these cycles is to translate information about the environment 
to reactions within the body in order to keep the organism safe and 
healthy. Often, they remain unnoticed, as they occur unconsciously and 
more instinctively than intentional perception and action. 

Fig.1: PI de Bruijn/
Architectencie, 
Assembly Hall of 
the Dutch Parlia-
ment, The hague 
1992, an overview 
of the roles in the 
plenary hall and 
their position



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Emotional states are the outcome of an interaction 
between, for instance, the central nervous system and 
visceromotor systems that regulate the organs. These 
emotional states can be understood as a first “gut 
feeling” about what is experienced. As Thompson 
and Varela explain “organismic regulation, because 
of its links with basic emotional operating systems 
… has a pervasive affective dimension that manifests 
in the range of affective behaviours and feelings.”12 
In other words, when we experience architecture, 
organismic regulation controls our first reaction to 
a building.13     

The autonomic nervous system, which is divided 
into the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous 
system, responds to these emotional states.14 The 
sympathetic nervous system has an activating role, 
as it accelerates the heart rate in response to certain 
circumstances. Therewith it regulates our “fight-
or-flight” response, as it can prepare the body for 
intense physical activity. The parasympathetic 
nervous system, however, calms the body. When 
circumstances suggest that the organism is safe, this 
system brings it to a state in which it can rest. 

Here, we can draw a parallel to what Edmund 
Burke has called the Sublime and Beautiful as 
categories of aesthetic enjoyment.15 The former 
is based on a tensioning of the body, when for 
example we stand on the edge of a cliff, the latter is 
based on a relaxation when we observe something 
serene and controlled. From this we can understand 
organismic regulation as the process that on the 
one hand makes us say “wow” when for example 
observing imposing or monumental architecture, 
and on the other makes us feel comfortable when a 
space is small and shielded.16      

This observation becomes more concrete when 
we consider the design of the Dutch plenary 
meeting hall. The hall is part of a building designed 
by Pi de Bruijn and realized in 1992, located at 
the Binnenhof in The Hague. It holds the plenary 
meetings of the parliament or the “Tweede Kamer” 

These 
emotional 

states can be 
understood 

as a first 
“gut feeling” 

about what is 
experienced.

“

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Fig.2: Possible emotional states evoked by the 
general layout of the Plenary Meeting Hall

Fig.3: Possible emotional states 
evoked in the center of the hall



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(second chamber), which has a comparable role 
to the House of Representatives in the U.S. or the 
House of Commons in Great Britain. The 150 
members of parliament are seated in six segments, 
facing their Chair(wo)man and clerks on one side 
and the government (cabinet) on the other. [Fig. 1] 

 When entering, walking through and resting in 
the arena-scaled hall, different emotional states will 
probably arise, related to different parts of the space. 
[Fig. 2-6] In the centre of the hall for example, one 
is in the middle of a large space, with a high ceiling 
in which all other users of the room are facing you 
due to the orientation of their seats. These elements 
seem intended to evoke a reaction of alertness. In 
contrast, in the small hallway below the public 
stands, users are mostly shielded from the large 
room, because the lower ceiling provides a space 
that feels much more soothing. It is no coincidence 
that most actual compromises are made here, where 
politicians that might be enemies in the “arena,” can 
feel at ease and come together.17     

When you are in the centre of the hall  users face a 
collection of large natural stone walls that rise from 
behind the Chair(wo)man to which comments are 
addressed. These solid walls might very well evoke 
a sense of awe and are clearly meant to impress 
via their monumentality. At the same time the 
furnishings of the meeting hall are designed in 
such a way that people are often shielded from each 
other. “Vak K,” the part in which the Cabinet is 
seated, is completely surrounded by a low wooden 
wall, which makes them in a way protected from 
the rest of the people. The interruption barrier (for 
members who respond to or question members of 
the cabinet) is comparable, with the exception that 
in this case the wall starts at about 20 cm above the 
ground, so that the member’s feet remain visible. 

SENSORIMOTOR COUPLING
The second category of ways in which body 

and the world are interwoven concerns more 



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Fig.4: Possible emotional states 
evoked by the lectern for speaking 
Members of Parliament

Fig.6: Possible emotional states 
evoked by the lectern for members 
of the Cabinet

Fig.5: Possible emotional states 
evoked by the desks and seats of 
Members of Parliament



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elaborate actions and movements through the 
environment. These movements are made possible 
by our so-called motor system, which is much 
more connected to perception than has previously 
been presupposed. As Susan Hurley explains in 
Consciousness in Action, following up on for example 
the work by Ulric Neisser, the generally assumed 
divide between the body and the mind has resulted 
in an input-output picture of perception.18 In that 
picture, perception forms the input from the world 
to the mind and action forms the output. The 
mind mediates between these two states: through 
thought it links the right input to the right output. 
However, discarding the Cartesian divide leads to 
the conclusion that perception and action are much 
more interwoven with each other than traditional 
views have acknowledged. Building on, amongst 
other theories, what has been called the reafference 
principle, Thompson and Varela explain, “situated 
activity takes the form of cycles of sensorimotor 
coupling with the environment. What the organism 
senses is a function of how it moves, and how it 
moves is a function of what it senses.”19     

This point was already developed in the 1970s 
by James Gibson in his theory of affordances.20 He 
argued that humans (and other animals) perceive 
the world through the actions that are possible 
within it. We encounter the affordances present in 
the environment, rather than perceiving the world 
through something like a photograph, in which all 
details are grasped at once. What the environment 
affords is what it offers, provides or furnishes an 
animal to do in it. A flat surface, for example, is seen 
as walk-on-able, a surface about 40 cm above the 
ground is sit-on-able, and round objects that can 
be grasped in the hand are throw-able and catch-
able. Such affordances are different for each animal 
or person, related to  their individual capabilities. 

The theory of affordances means that the 
designed environment of architecture is perceived 
in the same way, through the actions that it affords. 



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Fig.7: Actions of speaking afforded in 
the center of the hall

Fig.8: Actions of speaking afforded by the 
lectern for speaking Members of Parliament



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In the description of a relatively simple process 
of getting milk from a store nearby, architectural 
theorist Sarah William Goldhagen shows how 
these processes continually take place, mostly 
unconsciously, leaving room for thoughts about 
plans for the weekend.21 It shows how the built 
environment is continuously used as a means to 
something else, rather than being observed as a 
neutral object.

Stairs are perceived as providing the possibility 
to ascend, arcades are perceived for the possibility 
of walking through, and windows invite you to 
look outside. They do not determine the user to 
undertake any of these actions, but through the 
processes by which we perceive the environment 
and instrumentalize it for our actions, they do      
provide us with countless invitations which we do 
or do not act upon. The impact of an affordance 
therefore does not lie in the determination of a 
person’s actions (so I agree with Buday, the idea of 
“environmental determinism,” is problematic), but 
in the invitation it offers.22 

Furthermore, although the environment cannot 
determine what actions a user will undertake, it 
does often constrain the way in which actions can 
be performed.23 Stairs do not determine you to 
ascend, but they dictate where you will enter the 
next floor if you do. Arcades do not determine you 
to walk through them, but they do influence which 
rooms are the most accessible. And a window does 
not determine you to look through it, but it does 
influence what you will see if you do. 

In case of the plenary meeting hall, the 
affordances offered by the design are effectively 
endless, continuously inviting the users in the 
room to undertake certain actions. On a most basic 
level the room therefore both expresses and invites 
the activities it is designed for: a composition of 
seats, desks and microphones shows the purpose 
of using the room for Plenary meetings by the 
parliament. [Fig. 7-11] Some of these affordances 

Stairs do not 
determine 

the user to 
undertake 

any actions, 
but ... they   

do  provide us 
with countless 

invitations 
which we do 

or do not 
act upon. 

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Fig.9: Actions of observing afforded by 
the seats of Members of Parliament

Fig.10: Actions of walking afforded 
by the center of the hall



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have clear consequences for how the debates usually 
take place. Consider for example the position of 
lecterns relative to each other: they determine how 
the different users are facing one another when 
they speak. Members of Cabinet always face the 
Members of Parliament that respond to them using 
the interruption microphone, but they are standing 
parallel to the ones that are presenting a longer story. 
Furthermore, the lecterns often presuppose their 
users to be standing up, otherwise the microphone 
cannot be reached. This same microphone makes 
sure its users are facing the centre of the meeting 
hall, as they are positioned in a certain way. The 
Chair(wo)man can control who is allowed to speak, 
as he or she can turn microphones on and off. 

The arrangement of seats in the room forms the 
basis for how members of parliament are sitting 
in relation to the Cabinet and the Chair(wo)man 
during the plenary meetings. The seats provide room 
for 150 Members of Parliament, who are divided 
into six segments of 25 members. Some of these 
members are therefore closer to the debate than 
others, and might be quicker to use the interruption 
microphones than the so-called “backbenchers” 
behind them.24 The different parties are spread 
among the segments, so that members of a party are 
not necessarily sitting together in one group, and 
often mix with other parties. Walking paths between 
the segments make it possible to walk to the centre 
of the room or the hallway under the public stands, 
but they also provide space for members to discuss 
matters with each other between different debates. 
These are just a few examples of the long list of 
affordances offered by the meeting hall, that show 
what kind of impact they might have on the way in 
which daily activities take place. 

 
INTERSUBJECTIVE INTERACTION
The third category of “cycles of operation” 

concerns things that are active in social cognition 
and help humans understand each other. These 



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cycles make it possible to interpret others, and reason about their 
intentions, their desires and their emotions. Intersubjective interaction 
involves both structures that are also important to emotion as well as 
sensorimotor coupling and more specifically the use of mirror-neuron 
systems. In the 1990s a team of scientists discovered so-called mirror 
neurons that fire not only when we perform particular activities, but also 
when we see someone else performing that activity.25 This discovery has 
led scientists to believe that these neurons play a role in the understanding 
of emotions, actions and intentions of others (when these are already part 
of our own repertoire).26 For example, when we see someone else feeling 
sad, we virtually mirror this expression (although we do not carry out the 
actual movement) and by “observing” our own feelings arising from this 
expression, we understand the other is sad. So, we use ourselves as a kind of 

Fig.11: Actions of walking afforded between 
seats of Members of Parliament



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simulator, mirroring others, in order to make sense 
of the world. 

This process is generally known as empathy. 
According to Vittorio Gallese, one of the discoverers 
of mirror neurons, we use this process constantly.27 

Mirror neurons are active not only when we perceive 
other human beings, but also in the observation of 
inanimate objects. Recent fMRI studies have shown 
that neurons activated when we are being touched, 
fire when we perceive someone else being touched, 
but also when we perceive objects touching one 
another, such as when we see raindrops falling on 
the leaves of a plant.28 We not only use ourselves 
to simulate the actions and emotions of other 
people, but also to simulate our environment. This 
has led Gallese to replace the word “empathy” with 
“embodied simulation,” and argue that “the sense 
we attribute to our lived experience of the world 
is grounded in the affect-laden relational quality of 
our body’s action potentialities, enabled by the way 
they are mapped in our brains.”29    

Remarkably enough, when the first theories of 
empathy originated at the end of the nineteenth 
century, they were part of a philosophical theory 
on aesthetics, not of how we socially engage with 
other people. The German theorist Robert Vischer 
published On the Optical Sense of Form, in which 
he distinguished between Sehen as a relatively 
passive form of visual perception, and Schauen as 
a more active one.30 Aesthetic experience, with 
which reality is “grasped,” is based on the latter 
kind. During this aesthetic experience, we go 
through a process of Einfühlung, by which we “feel 
ourselves into” or simulate what we encounter. 
The environment is “reflected in certain vibrations 
and—who knows what—neural modifications” that 
make the experience possible.31 Vischer’s theories 
were followed by Theodor Lipps, whose Ästhetik, 
published at the start of the nineteenth century, 
explored the analysis of empathy in aesthetic 
experience further.32 He argued that everything we 

Remarkably 
enough, when the 

first theories 
of empathy 

originated at 
the end of the 

nineteenth 
century, they 

were part of a 
philosophical 

theory on 
aesthetics, not of      

how we socially 
engage with 

other people.

“

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experience is permeated by our own life. The experienced object is the 
result of both what has been given by the environment and the activity 
of the observer. For Lipps, aesthetic experience arose from the feeling or 
movement that an object evokes in us. For example, a great hall evokes a 
movement of expansion, and from that we understand its greatness. In 
the case of the Dutch parliament, which is itself a great hall, the aesthetic 
experience could include this same greatness both in the height of the 
ceiling as well as in the large tapestries on the wall. It can also include 
the appreciation of the clean shapes of pearwood in the furniture or the 
craftsmanship that must have been involved making it, although this 
interpretation of Einfühlung involves much more elaborate systems than 
simply mirror-neurons.33      

Furthermore, it has been suggested that mirror systems play an important 
role in language as well. Neuroscientist Michael Arbib hypothesizes that 
the ability to recognize manual actions in others provided a bridge via 
pantomime and imitation for the human capacity for both sign and 
spoken language.34 Following this, intersubjective interaction enables us to 
interpret and make sense of our environment. So, it is through this system 
and its integration with other systems that we can talk about concepts or 
messages that are communicated by architecture, based on their physical 
composition and the actions, both practical and emotional, that they make 
possible. 

Following Giacomo Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib in linking our mirror 
system to the highly evolved neural and social systems that enable us to use 
language and other forms of symbolic abstraction, it is through this last 
cycle that we understand the symbolic meaning provided by architecture. 
In the case of the Dutch Parliament, one can interpret the coat of arms 
printed on the seats of Members of Parliament as referring to the Dutch 
nation. Furthermore, we might interpret the hierarchy of different roles 
played in the debates through the differences in how luxuriously each seat 
is designed, through subtle height differences and through accents in the 
composition of desks such as the higher one or the Chair(wo)man. 

It is also through this cycle that we might interpret the green carpet, 
the grey ceiling and the tulip-shaped seats as representations of the Dutch 
landscape, as explained in a brochure on the “meaning” of de Bruijn’s 
design.35 Users however need quite some information to understand this 
connection. While people who have foreknowledge might indeed associate 
these symbols with what they represent, others not armed with such 
cultural apparati will be unlikely to understand it that way. 

As stated above, Thompson and Varela mention the involvement of 
processes of the first and second cycles in the third.36 Processes important 



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to emotions are also part of recognizing emotions 
in others, and mirror neurons are themselves part 
of sensorimotor systems. And the intertwining goes 
still further: evoked emotional states are probably 
also dependent on the affordances and messages one 
recognizes, and the perceived affordances are related 
to a person’s mood or their interpretation of the 
function of the room. The purpose of the framework 
is therefore not so much to separate each kind of 
impact but rather to show the elaborate range of 
impacts that are possible within one design. 

The implication of the theories as laid out 
above is that, without impact to the form of some 
physical change in the body there is no experience. 
Architectural experience therefore only exists through 
this impact. Still, such impact does not determine the 
behaviour of a building’s users. The two following 
remarks offer partial explanation in this regard.  

A NETWORK OF ACTORS
Firstly, this impact is spread throughout an 

endless network of little impacts that each play 
their own small yet significant role. The three 
kinds of cycles of operation reveal an elaborate and 
complicated range of endless modes of exchange 
between the world and the body, as the case-study 
has shown as well. Relations originate at different 
levels and in different ways at the same time and 
are therefore hardly ever observable as a one-to-
one relationship between a design decision and a 
(behavioural) change. 

How this works has previously been laid out by 
the so-called ‘Actor-Network-Theory’, conceived 
by sociologists and philosophers, of which Bruno 
Latour, John Law and Michel Callon are the best-
known examples.37 One of their basic claims is that 
in social processes, objects can play a role similar to 
that of human beings. Both animate and inanimate 
objects participate in our social lives significantly, 
together forming a large network of countless 
“actors” that each play a role. One design decision 



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Fig.12: Possible messages conveyed through 
the arrangement of seats in segments

Fig.13: Possible messages conveyed through 
the furniture of the Chair(wo)man



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can be seen as a drop in an ocean of actors, only 
some of them related to the designed physical 
environment. Pedestrians’ experience of a street, for 
example, can be seen as the sum of decisions like 
the general proportions, the plasticity of facades or 
the position of windows, etc., forming only a piece 
in a larger network of other determining factors, 
like recent events in the pedestrian’s life or her his 
general mood that day.  

Some attempts have been made to show 
determinant relations between design decisions and 
their effect on users. Take, for instance, research 
on the layout of hospital rooms in relation to the 
healing process, or educational environments in 
relation to learning processes.38 Or, closer to our 
case-study, consider how research in 2018 showed a 
relation between the voting behaviour of parliament 
members and their position relative to each other 
in the room.39 However useful such studies may 
be, they should always be interpreted with regard 
to the specificity of the case-studies on which they 
were based. In another situation the conditions 
might very well be different, so that the same design 
decisions could lead to different results. 

DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL
Secondly, it is worth considering the compatibilist 

view of philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argues 
that a deterministic universe does not rule out free 
will.40 He distinguishes between things in what he 
calls the scientific image on the one hand and the 
manifest image on the other. The first group consists 
of things like neurons, atoms and DNA, things 
that we know mostly from scientific research. The 
second group consists of things that we encounter 
in our everyday lives: colours, euros and promises, 
etc. These things have no location or substance and 
scientifically speaking they are not what people 
generally consider them to be. Free will is part of 
this latter group, so according to Dennett, free will 
is just as real as the colours, euros and promises that 



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play a significant role in everyday life. Scientifically speaking, one fact 
necessarily leads to another, however the endless number of causes and 
effects are impossible to sort-out in the lived-world of manifest images. 

We can apply this way of thinking to what we have encountered in this 
article: at a scientific level, the impact of the built environment on the user is 
a prerequisite for any environmental experience and this impact is part of a 
large network of different actors. In the practical world of manifest images, 
however, this network cannot possibly be understood in its entirety and 
therefore the effect of design decisions remains unpredictable to a certain 
extent. This means that in the lived-world of any subject experiencing the 
environment, the shaping role of design can only be more or less present 
and recognizable. Furthermore, the design process itself largely takes place 
at this practical level too, which makes it unlikely for a designer to foresee 
all the consequences of the countless design decisions he/she must make, 
either consciously or unconsciously.

EMPATHY
From the first part of this article we could conclude that claiming 

design decisions have no impact is problematic. From the second part we 
can add that claiming causality between design decision x and result y 
is equally problematic, as the full breadth of the network in which this 
impact is integrated cannot be understood from the practical level of our 
lived world and the design process. To conclude, I would like to draw 
attention to the skill of empathy being employed by the architect during 
the design process, which is of special relevance in this regard. During this 
process, in which the designer imagines himself or herself to be part of the 
environment he or she is designing, it is possible to assess many aspects 
at once, instead of focussing on the “drop in the ocean” of a single design 
decision. It offers the possibility to be receptive to what the environment 
has to offer instead of considering it solely in light of the conceptual ideas 
it was built on. 

Furthermore, we can see empathy as a skill that can be enriched: the 
aforementioned studies on healing environments, for instance, may 
be too specific to be implemented directly into other designs, but they 
provide insights that can be integrated into empathic processes, as do the 
theories on cognitive science of architectural experience. Moreover, these 
processes can be further enhanced in light of the plurality of identities 
of the future users. Knowledge of the identity of different end-users, or 
participatory processes in which contact between the designer and the 
end-user is established, improve the possibility of the designers’ capacity to 
understand the experience of other identities. 



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In this way, the skill of empathy can enrich 
the designers’ understanding of the effects their 
designs are likely to have and then to help align 
their decisions with their renovated understanding 
of users’ experiences. Empathy can contribute to 
an environment that finds a balance between its 
facilitating role in our lived-world daily processes 
while being receptive both to the plurality and the 
freedom of its users.

 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With special thanks to the reviewers and Michael 

Arbib for their helpful comments on an earlier 
version of this article.

ILLUSTRATIONS
The drawings and analyses are based on the 

following literature: 

Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal. The House 
of Representatives at work. August 2015. https://
www.houseofrepresentatives.nl/how-parliament-
works/house-representatives-work. 

ProDemos. Politics in the Netherlands (The 
Hague: ProDemos, 2013)

Herman Tjeenk Willink, ‘Verval van de 
democratische rechtsstaat en de rol van de pers.’ 
Het Expertisecentrum Journalistiek. 21 September 
2015. http://www.expertisecentrumjournalistiek.
nl/slot-toespraak-herman-tjeenk-willink-verval-
van-de-democratische-rechtsstaat-en-de-rol-van-
de-pers/. 

Joris Luyendijk, Je hebt het niet van mij, maar...: 
Een maand aan het Binnenhof (Amsterdam: 
Podium, 2010)

The drawings are also based on the following two 
interviews: 

we can 
see empathy 

as a skill 
that can be 

enriched.

“
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Alexander Pechtold, interviewed by the author. An interview on the role 
of the interior design of the Second Chamber in the debating culture (7 
September 2016)

Herman Tjeenk Willink, interviewed by the author. An interview on 
possible strategies for the Dutch political system (28 October 2016)

Complemented with research conducted in the architectural archive of 
The New Institute, Rotterdam and the personal archive of Pi de Bruijn.

ENDNOTES
1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Hoboken: Wiley, 1992), 362
2. Simon Richards, Architect Knows Best: Environmental Determinism in 

Architecture Culture from 1956 to the Present (Milton Park, Oxfordshire: 
Routledge, 2012).

3. See for example the introduction in Charles Jencks, The Language of 
Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1991), 23; 
Marlies Buurman, ‘Stadsgezichten: Kleiburg en de Bijlmer.’ Het Parool, 
(21 January 2011).

4. Alison Smithson, ‘The Violent Consumer, or Waiting For the Goodies’ 
Architectural Design, No.5 (1974).

5. Richard Buday, ‘We Shape Buildings, But Do Buildings Really Shape 
Us?’ Common Edge (April 13, 2017) https://commonedge.org/we-
shape-buildings-but-do-buildings-really-shape-us/ (Accessed October 
18, 2021); Note also the counterreaction to this article by Robert Lamb 
Hart: Robert Lamb Hart, ‘How Buildings Shape Us.’ Common Edge 
(September 21, 2020) https://commonedge.org/how-buildings-shape-
us/ (Accessed August 23, 2022).

6. Robert A.Wilson, and Lucia Foglia. ‘Embodied Cognition.’ The Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016), http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/win2016/entries/embodied-cognition.

7. For a discussion on this, see note 6. On the other hand, some important 
research has tended to stress both the anti-dualist elements in Descartes 
himself, and the uptake of those elements in some twentieth-century 
phenomenology, especially by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See for 
example Sara Heinämaa, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with Descartes: 
The living body and its position in metaphysics.’ In: Dan Zahavi, Sara 
Heinämaa and Hans Ruin (eds.) Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: 
Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries, by (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 
23-48.

8. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment, the Implications 



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of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design 
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 111.

9. Andrea Jelić, Gaetano Tieri, Federico De 
Matteis, Fabio Babiloni and Giovanni Vecchiato. 
‘The Enactive Approach to Architectural 
Experience: A Neurophysiological Perspective 
on Embodiment, Motivation, and Affordances.’ 
Frontiers in Psychology, No.7 (2016), 481.

10. Evan Thompson and Francisco J. Varela. 
‘Radical embodiment: neural dynamics and 
conciousness.’ TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 
Vol.5, No.10 (2001), 418-425.

11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 425.
13. Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment, 111
14. Laurie Kelly McCorry, ‘Physiology of the 

Autonomic Nervous System,’ American Journal 
of Pharmaceutical Education, Vol.71, No.4 
(2007), 78.

15. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry in-
to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and 
Beautiful. (1757). An interesting study in this 
regard can be found in the dissertation of Dmitri 
Kormanov,      which shows evidence that the 
sympathetic nervous system is indeed activated 
when experiencing sublime landscapes. Dmitri 
Kormanov, Feeling the landscape: Six Psychological 
Studies into Landscape Experience (Wageningen: 
Wageningen University, 2009).

16. Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment, 112-
113.

17. Joris Luyendijk, Je hebt het niet van mij, maar...: 
Een maand aan het Binnenhof (Amsterdam: 
Podium, 2010).

18.  Susan L. Hurley, Consciousness in Action (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); 
Ulric Neisser, Cognition and reality: Principles 
and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (San 
Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976).

19. Thompson and Varela, 418-425; The reafference 
principle has been coined by Erich von Holst 



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and Horst Mittelstaedt, ‘Das Reafferenzprinzip.’ Naturwissenschaften, 
No.37 (1951), 464-476.      

20. James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. 
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). The key idea of affordances was 
already present in Jakob Uexküll, Umwelten: “A stroll through the 
worlds of animals and men: a picture book of invisible worlds.” In: Clair 
H. Schiller, Instinctive Behavior: the Development of a Modern Concept 
(New York: International Universities Press, 1957), also in Semiotica, 
No.89, 319-391. Originally appeared as Jakob von Uexküll Streifzüge 
durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (Berlin: Springer, 1934).

21. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to your world. How the Built 
Environment Shapes Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 
2017), 52-54.

22. Buday ‘We Shape Buildings, But Do Buildings Really Shape Us?’ 
(Accessed October 18, 2021).

23. As Gibson notes in a later essay, “affordances do not cause behaviour 
but constrain or control it”. James Gibson, Reasons for Realism (edited 
by  Edward Reed and Rebecca Jones) (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum 
Publishers, 1982), 411.

24. Luyendijk, Je hebt het niet van mij, 53.
25. G. di Pellegrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, 

‘Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study,’ Exp 
Brain Res, Vol.91, No.1 (1992), 176-180; See also Giacomo Rizzolatti, 
Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese, ‘Mirrors in the Mind.’ Scientific 
American, Vol.295, no.5(2006), 54-61.

26. For a discussion of this, see Michael Arbib, When Brains Meet Buildings: 
A Conversation between Neuroscience and Architecture (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2021), 306-311.

27. Vittorio Gallese,‘Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal 
Experience.’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Vol.4 (2005),  
23-48.

28. S.J. Ebisch, M.G. Perrucci, A. Ferretti, C. Del Gratta, G.L. Romani, 
and V. Gallase, ‘The Sense of Touch: Embodied Simulation in a 
Visuotactile Mirroring Mechanism for Observed Animate or Inanimate 
Touch.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol.20, no.9 (2008).

29. Vittorio Gallese, Alessandro Gattara, ‘Embodied Simulation, Aesthetics, 
and Architecture: an Experimental Aesthetic Approach.’ In: Sarah 
Robinson, Juhani Pallasmaa (eds.), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, 
Embodiment, and the Future of Design, (Cambridge, Massachussetts: 
The MIT Press, 2015), 161-179; For a further discussion on this, see 
Arbib, When Brains Meet Buildings, 330-335.



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30. Robert Vischer et.al, Empathy, Form and Space: 
Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, 
Harry F. Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou 
(Introduction and Translation), (Santa Monica/
Chicago: The Getty Center for the History of 
Art and the Humanities, 1994), 89-123. 

31. Ibid., 90.
32. Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik; psychologie des schönen 

und der kunst (Hamburg: Voss Verlag, 1903).
33. For a discussion of the process of empathy 

in appreciating craftsmanship see Gallese and 
Gattara, Embodied Simulation, Aesthetics, 
and Architecture: an Experimental Aesthetic 
Approach,’ 161-179. For a further discussion 
on the primacy of mirror neurons in aesthetic 
experience, see Arbib, When Brains Meet 
Buildings, 336-349.

34. Michael Arbib, How the Brain Got Language: 
The Mirror System Hypothesis (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2012).

35. Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, ‘Tweede 
Kamer in Beeld,’ Tweede Kamer (November 2013), 
https://www.tweedekamer.nl/sites/default/-files/
field_uploads/Tweede%20Kamer%20in%20
Beeld_tcm181-210466_0.pdf.

36. Thompson and Varela, ‘Radical embodiment’ 
418-425.

37. See for example: Bruno Latour, ‘Where Are 
the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few 
Mundane Artifacts,’ in: Wiebe E. Bijker and 
John Law (eds.), Shaping Technology / Building 
Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change 
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 225-
258; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An 
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2005); John Law,. 
‘Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: 
Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity.’ Systems 
Practice, No.5 (1992), 379-393; Michel Callon, 
‘Techno-economic networks and irreversibility,’ 
In: John Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays 



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on Power, Technology and Domination, London: Routledge, 1991), 132-
165.

38. Goldhagen, Welcome to your world.
39. Alessandro Saia, ‘Random interactions in the Chamber: Legislators’ 

Behavior and Political Distance.’ Journal of Public Economics, (2018), 
225-240.

40. Daniel Dennett, ‘Free Will is as Real as Colors, Promises and Euros.’ 
Lecture at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, March 
12, 2016.

 

   



First step: Walking in Bernardo(’s) Sandals
Challenging what he criticized as the straitjacket 

of fashion, in 1946 the architect, designer, and 
author Bernard Rudofsky launched the line of 
footwear Bernardo Sandals. Making present the 
bodily awareness of the horizontal plane, they were 
designed to adapt to, rather than constrain, the 
anatomy of the foot, aspiring to remain timeless 
pieces, comfortable and wearable outside fads and 
short-lived trends. Decades later, they are still 
defying the passage of time.

More than mere footwear, the sandals are a design 
manifesto expressing the connection between feet 
and floors, always in touch through the intimacy 
of the sole, a relationship Rudofsky celebrates in 
architectural and design projects. Building upon the 
multiple meanings of the Italian word pianta,1 he 
notes the attraction between the sole of the foot (la 
pianta del piede) that caresses the sole of the house, 
and also its plan (la pianta della casa).2 Departing 
from modernist notions about the functionality 
and efficiency of plan organization, he establishes 
an affinity between the plan of the house and the 
materiality of its pavement: “The pavement will 
control the plan. Only on a good plan one can make 
a good pavement.”3 Not only does the floor become 
the place of interaction between the architectural 
body and the human body, but—this essay argues 
—it generates the mood and atmosphere of a place.           

This text begins from an intellectual nudge. 
Critical of scientific ecology in the research on 
the environment, philosopher Gernot Böhme 
introduces the “aesthetics of atmospheres” as an 
operative concept that factors in the subjectivity of 

On Foot: 
Embodied Atmospheres

Andreea Mihalache



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E
human experience in architectural and urban design. Looking at different 
scales of perception from architectural objects to urban landscapes, he 
contends that “atmosphere is the subject matter of architecture,”4 to which 
architectural critic David Leatherbarrow replies: “Is it?”5 Building upon 
the aesthetics of atmospheres (Böhme) and their association with habits 
(Leatherbarrow), this essay will walk the reader through Bernard Rudofsky’s 
constructions of embodied atmospheres, arguing that, unexpectedly, 
for Rudofsky the locus where atmospheres manifest themselves is the 
horizontal plane of the floor. As one moves through space, be it indoors or 
outdoors, the most immediate (yet unnoticed) encounter is the one with 
the pavement. Soft or hard, warm or cold, smooth or rough, ground planes 
have latent possibilities to provide the first opportunities for the body to 
know and feel its world. Engaging with the floors, one becomes attuned to 
the rhythms, pace, temperatures, textures, and sounds of the world.      

Like other midcentury architects, Rudofsky recognizes that modern 
architecture, and, in a larger sense, the consumer culture, have alienated 
people from their places. If to lose one’s place in the world is—quite 
literally—to lose ground, then becoming aware of the surfaces we step 
on might reconnect us to a deeper sense of the self. Beyond aesthetics, his 
attention to floors and pavements ultimately reflects an ethical concern 
with defining one’s place in the world.

SECOND STEP: PASSING THROUGH ATMOSPHERIC HABITS 
The emergence and frequency of the terms and concepts we employ 

both in research and informal language indicate tacit concerns underlying 
our everyday lives, as well as broader societal and cultural anxieties. 
Etymologically, the term atmosphere (from Greek atmos = vapor and 
sphaira = globe) originally designated the ring of vapor supposed to be 
“exhaled from the body of a planet,”6 but from the eighteenth century 
onward, it has also conveyed a “certain mood hanging in the air.”7 Moods, 
affects, atmospheres—appropriated into the architectural vocabulary from 
psychology and physics, these concepts have become recurrent themes in 
the work of many contemporary architects and theorists. If one notices 
an increased frequency of these terms in the architectural discourse, it is 
not because architecture has not been concerned with them in the past, 
but, rather, because a certain discontent with the current experience 
of the environment is prompting the search for answers outside the 
tangible and the measurable. A sign of a certain disenchantment with the 
quotidian, it speaks about the dissatisfaction with the banality of everyday 
experiences constantly mediated through screens and simulated realities. 
As philosopher Richard Kearney observes, “The more virtually connected 



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we are, the more solitary we become. We ‘see’ brave 
new worlds, but ‘feel’ less and less in touch with 
them.”8

The interest in atmospheres traverses fields 
and disciplines. In architecture, Peter Zumthor, 
Juhani Pallasmaa, and Steven Holl are among 
the most notable contemporary designers and 
theorists invested in the topic of atmospheres, 
but ideas about constructing the atmosphere of a 
place are not new. Alberto Perez-Gomez observes 
an implicit interest in atmospheres as early as 
Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture, where a 
tempered and balanced environment was at the core 
of a healthy life.9 Building upon current scientific 
evidence demonstrating the role of feelings, 
emotions, and moods that architecture engenders 
in our psychosomatic health, he demonstrates 
the importance of studying these hidden and 
unmeasurable dimensions of architecture.10 Juhani 
Pallasmaa observes that it was only from the mid-
1990s onward that the experience of architecture 
has begun to replace a long-established formal 
approach to design.11 Indeed, it seems that 
theorizing unquantifiable and elusive concepts such 
as atmosphere, mood or ambiance has emerged as a 
relatively new phenomenon in the early 2000s.12 
This “atmospheric turn” has various explanations 
that range from deterministic views to social and 
political arguments, from subjectivity to scientific 
evidence.13 Peter Zumthor defines atmosphere as an 
almost-mystical quality of a space, intrinsic to those 
architectures that move you.14 He finds it in “the 
magic of things, the magic of the real world,”15 and 
believes that it offers a possible response to the quest 
for “architectural quality.”16 

From the atmosphere of medieval cathedrals 
(built on the transfiguration of light passing through 
stained glass), to the Renaissance villas in the Italian 
Veneto (intimately connected with existing natural 
caves and breathing the air that circulated naturally 
through a sophisticated system of vents and ducts), 

one becomes 
attuned 

to tHE 
rhythms, 

pace, 
temperatures, 

textures, 
and sounds  

OF THE WORLD

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to Eileen Gray’s marvelous E.1027 house (centered on experiencing the 
space through sensuous materials and textures defining the mood of 
each room), or Le Corbusier’s espace indicible (suggesting a phenomenal 
experience of the space), architects have long tackled—both explicitly and 
implicitly—the atmosphere of a place.  

In philosophy, the influential work of Hermann Schmitz, regarded as a 
founding father of research on atmospheres, left its mark on the writings 
of contemporary continental philosophers such as Gernot Böhme and 
Tonino Griffero.17 The former explicitly calls into question the primacy 
of vision in people’s interaction with the environment and advocates for 
integrated approaches to architecture and city planning, in both design 
and scholarship, that should carefully consider and actively engage all our 
senses. Böhme observes that atmospheres have an in-between quality: they 
relate factual traits of the environment with one’s bodily feeling in that 
environment, so are both spatial and emotional.18 In other words, they 
are situated between the subject and the object: they touch one’s bodily 
space, which is “neither the place a person’s body takes up, nor the volume 
that it constitutes,” but the sphere of one’s material presence.19 Therefore, 
atmospheres are about presence, and never about representation. Böhme 
proposes that examining architecture and cities through the lens of the 
aesthetics of atmosphere produces two major shifts: first, the turn from 
“what” something represents to “how” something is present.20 (Thus, 
“aesthetics” recovers its original meaning, that of a theory of perception, 
rather than the visual concern with beauty and artistic taste prevalent from 
the eighteenth century onward.) Second, it enables the shift from the form 
or shape of things to the way they engage with the space of our bodily 
presence.21 For Böhme, atmosphere is the subject matter of architecture.22

Pondering over the meaning and implications of this argument, David 
Leatherbarrow nuances Böhme’s theory and outlines—not unlike Le 
Corbusier’s tenets for a new architecture—five points on architectural 
atmospheres.23 First, they manifest themselves immediately or, like 
Böhme also remarked, they are about presence. Second, they are specific 
to historical and cultural contexts, which suggests that they cannot be 
transferred or replicated outside of where they are formed. Third, they are a 
matter of both emotions and intellect. Fourth, they construct backgrounds, 
in the double sense of layers of history and present appearances. Lastly, 
atmospheres are correlated with habits.24 

The latter is perhaps the most relevant for the argument of this essay: 
the idea that the mood of a space emerges from concrete, material 
conditions, from practices and rituals that are enacted and performed 
in unique historical and cultural contexts. Leatherbarrow observes that 



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practical experience and everyday use are key in 
creating atmospheres, which play a two-part role, 
“initial and global, then marginal and tacit.”25 
Simply put, one first perceives them as distinct 
phenomena in the foreground of their experience 
(the way a traveler visiting a medieval city for the 
first time might register and treasure every uncanny 
detail), but eventually, by force of habit and 
repetition, they recede into the background (the 
way an inhabitant of the same historic city is no 
longer aware of what has become familiar and well-
known). Leatherbarrow proposes that atmospheres 
are neither an attribute of the settings from which 
they proceed, nor a matter of individual sentiments 
– he draws attention, instead, to the continuity, 
rather than the split, between object and subject. 

His approach implicitly challenges Böhme’s 
argument that stage set design (where moods are 
fabricated from objective and carefully manipulated 
elements such as sound, illumination or spatial 
geometries) is the paradigm for a theory of 
atmosphere.26 One of Böhme’s tacit goals is to remove 
the impreciseness associated with atmospheres and 
demonstrate that, despite their vagueness, they 
can be produced from concrete factors. However, 
his use of stage set design as the paradigm for this 
theory privileges conventions and artificiality as 
modus operandi, suggesting scripted and therefore 
predictable scenarios, and thus removing the sense 
of spontaneity or happenstance. On the other 
hand, if habits are intrinsic to the formation of 
atmospheres, as Leatherbarrow suggests, then the 
design process alone does not have the power to fully 
prescribe specific ambiances, therefore one needs 
to understand the environment through a more-
encompassing lens, not only beyond its immediate 
physical manifestations but also from within the 
factors that have constituted it throughout time this 
is to say that atmposphere are not about spontaneous 
surfacing or controlled design, but rather that 
critical to grasping their nature is understanding 



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practices of inhabitation developed and sedimented over time. 

It is this balancing act between control and release, between design 
practices and living practices, between space and time, between the 
measurable and the immeasurable that Bernard Rudofsky tackles in many 
of his writings and projects spanning the middle and late decades of the 
twentieth century, where he centers his attention on the overlooked role 
of floors and pavements.

Third Step: Touching the Floor
Known primarily for his 1964 exhibition (and subsequent catalog) 

Architecture without Architects, Rudofsky was a tireless traveler, an ingenious 
footwear designer, a prolific writer, and a gifted architect. At a time when 
most architects looked up above the ground to see as a prevailing mode 
to perceive the environment, he looked down to feel the touch of the 
floor. Despite his consistent return to the theme of floors and pavements, 
scholarship has only marginally examined what is at stake in his obsessive 
return to these horizontal surfaces.27 Rudofsky offers an architectural 
and existential way of anchoring us into the world through floors and 
pavements as the often-overlooked canvas against which life itself unfolds. 
They construct the mood of a place by being active agents of our various 
practices of inhabitation.  

“Stone mosaic, marble slabs, stucco reliefs, mural decorations from the 
simplest geometric ornamentation to elaborate paintings, were employed 
[in Roman outdoor rooms] to establish a mood particularly conducive to 
spiritual composure,” writes Rudofsky in 1952.28 That pavements define 
the character of a room and have the potential to generate spiritual 
dispositions was well-known in ancient civilizations: “Do you know the 
Faun House in Pompei? Here we understand why the Pompeians who 
inherited the Greek culture could easily give up the frescoes: they had 
paintings of profound beauty on the floor.”29

The ground plane is what ties together the individual, the house, and 
the city: house floor or city pavement, the horizontal surface, intimately 
related to the human body through the sense of touch, is the first element 
that creates the mood of a space. The floors have the potential to delay 
movement, slow down the pace, and, implicitly, expand time. As the only 
surfaces that constantly engage the sense of touch, they are neither purely 
functional, nor merely aesthetic. Rarely seen, they are always felt. It is 
through floors and pavements that the sense of touch remains active, and 
yet paradoxically, designs often overlook them. Floors and pavements 
carry an inherent contradiction: on the one hand, they need not to be 
noticed in order to function properly; on the other, as they become 



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unnoticed, they take away one’s awareness of the 
ground. Through floors and pavements, individuals 
experience the unmediated presence of the earth 
while at the same time gain a sense of belonging 
to a larger community. They ground human beings 
into the earth and situate them within the horizon 
of a specific culture.

Although Western philosophy has primarily been 
sight-centered, in the twentieth century existential 
phenomenology recovered Aristotle’s claim in De 
Anima that touch is the most universal, pervasive, 
and intelligent of the senses.30 Against the Platonic 
idea that sight is superior to touch because it is 
distant and mediated (hence the elevated status of 
theoria, i.e. to look at, to speculate), Aristotle argues 
that touch, in fact, does have a medium and its 
medium is the flesh.31 Through touch one reads 
and interprets the world and at the same time is 
touched by it. It is in this reciprocity between the 
self and the world that Rudofsky situates his interest 
in the continuity between the sole of the foot, the 
pavement of the building, and the skin of the earth. 

For Rudofsky, the act of building starts from 
floors and walls, the most vital elements of the 
architectural vocabulary that also give human beings 
the ontological status of their upright posture. “A 
wall is the bread of architecture. (…) Building his 
first wall, he [the man] became, mentally, a biped.”32 
Elsewhere, he writes: “The floor is, literally and 
figuratively, the touchstone of a civilization. A 
good floor is much more than a delight to the 
eye; it appeals to that most sensuous of our senses, 
touch.”33 In the February 1938 issue of the Italian 
architecture journal Domus, Rudofsky publishes 
what appears to be an illustration of an architectural 
foundational moment: builders have laid out in plan 
the foundations of the outer walls of a house and 
are now settling the stones to stabilize the structure. 
Rudofsky’s caption stresses the primordial role of 
the floor and floorplan as the organizing forces of 
the building: “Architecture begins with a pavement: 

if habits are 
intrinsic to the 

formation of 
atmospheres, as 
Leatherbarrow 

suggests, then 
the design 

process alone 
does not have the 

power to fully 
prescribe specific 

ambiances

“

”



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the architect inscribes order in the freedom of nature. But this order has to 
be in harmony with nature.”34

The drawing recalls ancient practices of inscribing the plan of a building 
at full-scale onto the site itself. As Paul Emmons observes, the construction 
of the plan on site anticipates the future building, establishing an intimate 
connection between drawing, site, and architecture.35 While in pre-modern 
times, the floor was the actual floor plan of the new construction, this 
intimate relationship has been gradually lost with the changing practices of 
architectural drawing.36 No longer viewed as an embodied footprint, but 
primarily as a horizontal section, today the floor plan bears little, if any 
affinity at all with the architectural floor.37 Challenging these modern forms 
of representation, Rudofsky explores drawings and buildings as embodied 
phenomena. The surface of the page, the surface of the building floor, and 
the surface of the site itself become one and thus the pavement acquires 
its ontological role. Because “every culture has its perfect pavement,”38 
floors teach more about a certain civilization than any writings or indirect 
accounts.39

Throughout his career, Rudofsky remains a relentless critic of the 
commodification of architecture both in the domestic realm and in 
the public sphere. In 1955, he publishes Behind the Picture Window, a 
collection of essays on the nature of the modern house, written as satires, 
rather than academic papers. The chapters lay out his frustrations with 
the “American way of life”40 and propose what he calls elsewhere “a new 
way of living”41 based on lessons learned from past civilizations. One 

Fig 1: Bernard Rudofsky, Plan of the Procida House project 
published in Domus, Issue 123 (March 1938) 



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such example (which he describes in a later book) 
are the Neolithic houses in Lindenthal, Germany 
discovered in the early decades of the twentieth 
century, and which reveal to Rudofsky a methodical 
architectural strategy that is neither accidental nor 
clumsy.42 Central to their design is the sculpted floor 
that celebrates the intimate encounter of the body 
with the earth and, as the authors infers, situates 
the individual in a specific horizon of inhabitation:

What lifts the Lindenthal houses above the 
commonplace is their sculpted floor. (…) Pausing 
for a moment in the amble of our flat-footed way 
of life (…) it seems that somewhere in the course 
of human advancement we lost our capacity for 
enjoying well-turned-out space. What probably 
happened is that our Fingerspitzengefühl—
our “fingertip feeling”—progressively deserted 
us while numbness crept up on our toes and 
buttocks, body parts traditionally hidden. Yet 
it is exactly these parts that are instrumental in 
probing the ground on which we walk, stand, or 
sit, for they, like no others, keep us in close touch 
with our surroundings.43

The metaphor of the “fingertip feeling” evokes 
both the sense of touch and a design intuition, that – 
neither exact, nor imprecise – is built upon practice 
and habits, and relies upon all senses. Poetry seizes 
the synesthetic experience born at the encounter of 
sight and touch: “I see with my fingertips / what my 
eyes touch.”44 If one can see with their fingers, then 
one can also know with the toes of their feet that – 
not unlike one’s hands—feel, sense, and make sense 
of the environment through touch.  

Fourth Step: Entering the House
In 1938, Rudofsky publishes in Domus the 

drawings for a house on the island of Procida, off 
the coast of Naples. Titled “Non ci vuole un nuovo 
modo di costruire, ci vuole un nuovo modo di vivere” 
(translated in English as “What We Need is not New 
Technologies, but a New Way of Living”), the article 

That 
pavements 

define the 
character of a 
room and have 

the potential 
to generate 

spiritual 
dispositions was 

well-known 
in ancient 

civilizations

“

”



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constitutes, as Rudofsky himself will acknowledge later, the kernel of “half 
a dozen books on architecture, apparel and related matters.”45 Designed 
for a piece of land that he and his wife Berta bought on the island in 
1935, the project, although never built, is Rudofsky’s design manifesto for 
the ideal house. (fig.1) A harmonious encounter between architecture and 
the practices of everyday life, the ideal home eliminates the unnecessary 
prostheses of consumerism, seeking an unmediated relationship between 
inhabitants, their customs, nature, and design.

Having lived and worked in Italy for several years, Rudofsky praised 
and learned from the integration of landscape, design, and lifestyle that 
he noted (and idealized) in the peninsula. Building bridges across time 
and space, his account of the Procida house recalls Pliny the Younger’s 
descriptions of his Tuscan Villa, rendered in minute details in his letters.46 
Pliny’s peripatetic narration moves from the larger scale of landscape and 
climate to renditions of individual rooms, all of which have an intentional 
relationship with the outdoors. Views, sounds, textures create an atmosphere 
attuned to the seasons, as well as the inhabitant’s lifestyle: “a little fountain, 
playing through several small pipes into a vase it encloses, produces a most 
pleasing murmur;” a bedroom with two different orientations looks upon 
a cascade “which entertains at once both the eye and the ear.” Rooms are 
carefully designed with the appropriate orientation that offers shade in 
the summer and sun exposure in the winter, as well as balanced views 
towards the Apennine valleys, vineyards, bodies of water, ivy-covered trees, 
cypresses, and roses. 

In Rudofsky’s Procida project, carefully observed habits, rather than 
programmatic specifications, generate the atmosphere of each space, 
shown in hybrid forms of architectural representation that combine 
two-dimensional and perspectival views. The beginning of the article 
announces that people have long lost the contact with the ground.47 From 
the horseback rider who needs special tools to remove her boots, to the 
woman wearing heels unsuited for walking, to the athlete or the ballerina, 
everyone has lost touch with the earth through the multiple layers 
interposed between the foot and the earth itself.48 More than a rhetorical 
trope or a nostalgic longing for an idyllic pre-modern time, this statement 
indicates a deeper loss: the erosion of our grounding and the dissolution 
of tectonics. As Rudofsky writes elsewhere, modern houses, with their 
transparent walls, appear so light that they could fly away at any moment 
like a magic carpet.49 The gradual disappearance of tectonics translates 
into human uprootedness, and this sense of displacement finds its physical 
expression in the cookie-cutter houses of suburban developments, which 
simultaneously respond to and create the need for artificial environments 



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that remain unchanged, irrespective of location, 
living customs or individual habits.

Designed in a modern vocabulary, the Procida 
house challenges modern assumptions about 
function and program. Although the rooms are 
designated through conventional nomenclature 
(living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom, 
etc.), the project describes and responds to the 
activities taking place in these spaces, which are 
shown in unconventional forms of architectural 
representation. People’s movements between 
inside and outside are choreographed through the 
materials and textures of floors. In a subtle play of 
scales and textures, the house transforms furniture 
into architecture and architecture into furniture. 
Considering them superfluous, Rudofsky eliminates 
the dining table, the desk, the night table, the 
kitchen table, and the bathtub.50 Having its entire 
floor made of mattresses, the bedroom becomes an 
oversized bed (not unlike Japanese rooms covered 
in tatami),51 where one can only walk barefoot. 
In his theory of inhabitation, Rudofsky operates 
an essential distinction between washing (as 
the modern utilitarian act of removing dirt and 
grime) and bathing (as an ancient form of ritual or 
cultivated leisure).52 He expresses it by placing the 
toilet and the sink, and, respectively, the bathtub, in 
different spaces. The bathroom becomes, in fact, a 
bathtub: dipping into the ground, the floor carves 
it out from the ground plane itself, thus creating 
an intimate relationship between the body of the 
bather and the earth itself. The patio with its natural 
pavement of grass, daisies, violets, and orchids, is the 
true living room of the house, which itself “grows” 
from the floor plane. A tent in the summer and a 
fireplace (shared with the music room) in colder 
weather, allow for the year-round inhabitation 
of this outdoor room. Firmly anchored into the 
ground, the body of the house and the bodies of its 
inhabitants find their place in the world. 



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Fifth Step: Wandering Down the Street
Shifting his attention from the domestic realm to the public sphere, 

in 1969 Rudofsky publishes Streets for People: A Primer for Americans, a 
book “about the great outdoors, the pedestrian street, and the people one 
meets there.”53 Written at a time when America enthusiastically embraces 
suburban living while ignoring its urban centers and public spaces, the 
book has a twofold goal: to unpack the malfunctions of American cities in 
contrast with their European counterparts and to provide design resources 
for a future when even Americans will recognize the need for “a more 
dignified city life.”54

Lavishly illustrated with Rudofsky’s own photographs and filled with 
erudite literary and musical references, each chapter addresses a particular 
theme: cleanliness and hygiene, covered urban structures (such as canopies, 
porticoes, and gallerias), urban practices (from walking and strolling to 
processions, rituals, and performances), soundscapes and street music, 
street names, stairs, bridges, elevated streets, water and street food. An 
entire chapter, “Diamant Streets and Crystal Pavements” (a reference 
to the frozen water canals of Venice), is dedicated to urban floors and 
their intimate connection with the body of the pedestrian. Textures and 
colors bring to life this canvas that unfolds under people’s feet often as an 
extension of the house floors. Evocative descriptions conjure up the marble- 
and lava-paved streets of antiquity, the splendor of Babylonian streets, the 
square hard stones of Florence, the pink marble mosaic of a street gutter in 
Evora, or brick-paved ramps with stone footholds for horses.

The atmosphere of the city results from the orchestration of all these 
different elements articulated on the ground plane, which, almost like 
a living creature, moves, undulates, and meanders. A firm presence in 
space, as Böhme describes the atmosphere, yet often tacit and marginal, as 
Leatherbarrow puts it, the city pavement establishes connections between 
different scales – the personal scale of the body, the convivial scale of the 
community, the larger one of the environment – and remains a ubiquitous, 
yet unremarkable, actor in the urban choreography of the city. 

Rudofsky’s nostalgia for a pre-industrial society and for the cities of 
the Old World is more than anything a nostalgia for time as embodied 
duration, rather than instantaneity. While he often idealizes a far-from-
perfect world, he presents architectural ideas whose goal is to slow down 
time. The floor is the architectural element with the immediate potential 
to make people tarry and linger as they move through space. The most 
inconspicuous, yet the most direct in its engagement with the body, the 
floor constructs the physical measure of our pace. By slowing down its 
pace, the body readjusts to its environment. 



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The floors Rudofsky imagines are often 
impractical, inaccessible to everyone, unsuited for 
comfortable walking, whimsical, and, sometimes, 
quite useless. However, what is at stake in his 
emphasis on the horizontal plane is the awareness 
of time as embodied experience (particularly 
relevant at a moment when architecture is mainly 
concerned with space) and the ethical dimension of 
finding one’s place on earth. The in-between quality 
that Böhme attributes to atmospheres, along with 
Leatherbarrow’s emphasis on habits and behaviors, 
are manifested in Rudofsky’s celebration of floors as 
“the touchstone of a civilization.” 

Last Step: Strolling Away
On the otherwise smooth and inconspicuous 

floor of the Arsenale Building at the 2021 Venice 
Architectural Biennale, one stumbles upon a 
mosaic of stones, some of them carved out in three-
dimensional configurations, with their interiors 
gilded. Among the thought-provoking proposals 
displayed in the exhibition that float, fly, and 
defy gravity, this elegant gesture simply reminds 
us of where we stand in the world. Marking the 
earth, these golden hieroglyphs choreograph the 
dance between “I” and “us,” between a body and a 
multitude of bodies, between low and high, below 
and above. Making us aware of the depth of our 
ground plane, (polished) stone and (shimmering) 
gold define a volume of space and its atmosphere. 
One of the most notable—and most subtle—
projects at the Biennale, this installation designed 
by the Portuguese office Aires Mateus recognizes the 
forgotten role of pavements. “Architecture answers 
to its time. Some things, however, never change: we 
live together under the same sky; we live together 
on the same ground. The sky above our head, 
the ground under our feet: a natural metaphor of 
community.”55 If atmospheres are about presence, 
as Böhme contends, and they cannot exist in the 
absence of habits, as Leatherbarrow observes, 

the 
atmosphere 

of the city 
results from the 

orchestration 
of elements 

articulated on 
the ground plane, 

which, almost 
like a living 

creature, moves, 
undulates, and 

meanders.

“

”



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then the ground, as Rudofsky and Aires Mateus show, could become the 
starting point of further interrogations about the nature of atmospheric 
inhabitations. Ultimately, to sense the mood of a place and to find our 
pace and place in the world we might have to close our eyes and honor our 
“fingertip feeling.” We might have to touch instead of look and tiptoe our 
way through space so that not only do we see with the tips of our fingers, 
but also understand with the tips of our toes. 

ENDNotes
1. Pianta means sole, a level in the house, but also a plant 
2. Bernard Rudofsky, ‘Variazioni,’ Domus, Issue 124 (April 1938), 14
3. Rudofsky, ‘Variazioni,’ 15 (translation by the author)
4. Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (London/New York: 

Routledge, 2017), 135-140; these ideas are first published in English in 
an earlier essay from 2002 

5. David Leatherbarrow, ‘Atmospheric Conditions,’ In: Henriette Steiner 
and Maximilian Sternberg  (eds.), Phenomenologies of the City: Studies 
in the History and Philosophy of Architecture (London: Ashgate, 2015)

6. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, entry “atmosphere.”
7. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 2
8. Richard Kearney, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense (New York: 

Columbia University Press, 2021), 4-5
9. Alberto Perez-Gomez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis 

of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2016),  2
10. Ibid., 1-13. 

Fig 2: Aires Mateus, Ground, Venice Biennale in 2021



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11. Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere: 
Peripheral Perception in Existential Experience,’ 
In: Christian Borch (ed.), Architectural 
Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of 
Architecture. (Basel: Birkhauser, 2014), 19

12. Among the most recent publications in the field, 
one will find: Journal of Architectural Education, 
“Atmospheres,” Vl. 73 Issue 1 March 2019; 
Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Attunement; Borch (ed.), 
Architectural Atmospheres; Klaske Havik, Hans 
Teerds, and Gus Tielens, with Juhani Pallasmaa 
and Peter Zumthor, Building Atmosphere. 
OASE#91 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2013); 
Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural 
Environments, Surrounding Objects (Basel: 
Birkhauser, 2006). Quite tellingly, Adrian Forty’s 
Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern 
Architecture from 2000, a book that eruditely 
traces the philosophical and intellectual history 
of architectural terminology, does not include an 
entry on architectural moods or atmospheres.

13. Christian Borch justifies the rationale of a volume 
he edited in 2014 as a follow-up to current fads 
and fashions that examined the atmospheric 
qualities of architecture and urban spaces. 
(Borch, “Introduction: Why Atmospheres?” in 
Borch (ed.), Architectural Atmospheres)

14. Zumthor, Atmospheres, 11
15. Ibid., 19
16. Ibid., 11
17. In 1969, Hermann Schmitz publishes The 

Sphere of the Emotions where he discusses 
emotions as atmospheres. His work, which is 
still to be translated into English, exercised a 
decisive influence on Gernot Böhme (whose 
first publication on atmospheres, Atmosphäre: 
Essays zur neuen Äesthetik, dates from 1995) and 
Tonino Griffero (Atmosferologia: Estetica degli 
spazi emozionali, first published in 2010 and 
translated into English in 2014) 

18. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 3



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19. Ibid., 180
20. Ibid., 26
21. Ibid., 5
22. Ibid., 135-140
23. Leatherbarrow, ‘Atmospheric Conditions,’ 85-100
24. Ibid., 96
25. Ibid., 87
26. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 3
27. The topic appears in full book chapters or specific reflections in various 

articles. He dedicates an entire book to the theme of streets and street 
life (Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (New 
York:  Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969), designs and commercializes 
a line of footwear that exists to this day (the Bernardo Sandals), and 
introduces original, if impractical, floors in the exhibitions he curates.

28. Bernard Rudofsky, ‘Giardino, stanza all’aperto: a proposito della casa 
giardino a Long Island, NY,’ Domus, Issue 272 (July-August 1952), 5

29. Rudofsky, ‘Variazioni,’ 15
30. See Kearney, Touch, Ch.2 ‘Philosophies of Touch: From Aristotle to 

Phenomenology,’ 33-60
31. Ibid., 35
32. Bernard Rudofsky, ‘The Bread of Architecture.’ Arts & Architecture, 

Vol.69, No.10 (Oct. 1952), 28
33. Bernard Rudofsky, ‘Before the Architects.’ Design Quarterly, 

No.118/119 (1982) 61; The same idea reappears Bernard Rudofsky, 
Behind the Picture Window (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 
186 

34. Rudofsky, ‘L’architettura comincia con un pavimento,’ in: Domus no. 
122 (February 1938), 1

35. Paul Emmons, Drawing Imagining Building: Embodiment in 
Architectural design Practices. (London/New York: Routledge, 2019), 
Ch.1. ‘Footprint Plans,’ 21-47

36. Emmons observes: “The close relationship between plan and earth is 
shown through practices of inscribing the plan at full-scale onto a site.” 
Ibid., 29

37. Ibid., Ch.1. ‘Footprint Plans,’ 21-47
38. Rudofsky, “Variazioni,” 15
39. Rudofsky, “Before the Architects,” 61
40. Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window, 5
41. Rudofsky, ‘Non ci vuole un nuovo modo di costruire, ci vuole un 

nuovo modo di vivere,’ in: Domus, Issue 123 (March 1938), 5 
42. Bernard Rudofsky, The Prodigious Builders. Notes towards a Natural 



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History of Architecture. (New York and London: 
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 102-107

44.  Octavio Paz, ‘This Side.’ The poem can be 
found online: https://www.poetryverse.com/
octavio-paz-poems/this-side 

45. Front matter to Bernard Rudofsky, Now I Lay 
Me Down to Eat: Notes and Footnotes on the Lost 
Art of Living (New York: Anchor Books, 1980)

46. Pliny the Younger, “LII Letter to Domitius 
Apollinaris,” https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/
ancient/pliny-letters.asp#GenPart%20VII

47. Rudofsky, “Non ci vuole un nuovo modo di 
costruire, ci vuole un nuovo modo di vivere,” in: 
Domus, Issue 272 (July-August 1952), 6

48. Ibid., 6.
49. Rudofsky, ‘Giardino, stanza all’aperto,’ Domus 

Issue 123 (March 1938), 71
50. Rudofsky, ‘Non ci vuole un nuovo modo di 

costruire, ci vuole un nuovo modo di vivere, 
Domus, Issue 272, (July-August 1952), 8

51. Ugo Rossi makes this observation in his analysis 
of the Procida house in Ugo Rossi, Bernard 
Rudofsky Architetto (Napoli: Clean Edizioni, 
2016), 76

52. Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window, chapter 
‘Our indecorous bathroom’ 

53. Rudofsky, Streets for People, 15
54. Ibid., 21
55. Hashim Sarkis, Biennale Architettura 2021: 

How Will We Live Together? (Venice: La Biennale 
di Venezia, 2021)



Cover, pp. 4, 12, 50: Hans Teerds
p. 56: Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0
pp. 60, 62: © Hood Design Studio, Oakland
p. 66: Jean-François Noël, 1973
p. 68: Arnaud Journois/Le Parisien, 2016
p. 84, 88, 92: Screenshots from Il Tetto, Vittorio De Sicca, 1956
p. 118 (Fig.1): ©Leventis Municipal Museum, Nicosia (Donation: Lellos Demetriades. 

B/1989/204,6)
pp. 118 (Fig.2), 122 (Fig 6.), 124 (Fig 7, 8), 126 (Fig.9), 132 (Fig 11, 12): Stella 

Evangelidou. 
pp. 118 (Fig.3), 122 (Fig.5), 132 (Fig.10): © Nicosia Municipality 
p. 118 (Fig.4): © Press and Information Office (PIO).
pp. 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 156: Margit van Schaik  
p. 172: Domus, Issue123 (March 1938)
p. 178: Andreea Mihalache

Image Credits



ERIKA BRANDL is architect and a PhD candidate at the 
Department of Philosphy of the University of Bergen, 
Norway

MARGARET CRAWFORD  is professor History and Theory of 
Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. 
CA, USA

STELLA EVANGELIDOU   is architect and Adjunct Faculty 
Member at Frederick University, Limasol, Cyprus

SAUL FISHER is Associate Professor of Philosophy and 
Associate Provost at Mercy University, Dobbs Ferry, 
NY, USA

KENNETH FRAMPTON is em.Professor of Architectural History 
at Columbia University, New York, USA 

ANDREEA MIHALaCHE is Assistant Professor at Clemson School 
of Architecture, Clemson, SC, USA

CHANTAL MOUFFE is em.Professor of Political Theory at the 
University of Westminster, London, UK

ESTHER LORENZ is architect and Associate Professor of 
Architecture at the School of Architecture, University 
of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Hans Teerds is architect and urban designer and works as 
Senior Lecturer at the Institute for the History and 
Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich, Switzerland

MARGIT VAN SCHAIK is architect at Baltussen - Van Schaik, 
Rotterdam, The Netherlands

SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN is Professor of Philosophy at 
Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden 

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response pieces should be between 500 and 1,500 words, and book reviews 
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General Formatting
All submissions should be presented in accordance with the University of Chicago 
Style. Papers should be RTF documents, 12 point font, Times New Roman, 
double-spaced, and with no additional or otherwise unique formatting. References 
should be manually placed in brackets (e.g. [1], [2], and so on) with full citation 
information placed in the references section at the end of the document.

Photo Guidelines and Image Permissions
Images should be at least 300 dpi and read well in greyscale prints. The images 
should be submitted as individual files (TIFF or JPEG), in combination with proof 
of copyright permission. Authors are responsible for obtaining image permissions, 
and are asked to have done so prior to submitting their papers for review.  
The editors can be of help in finding and securing images. Please send inquiries 
about images approvals to Prof. Tom Spector at tom.spector@okstate.edu.

The papers published by Architecture Philosophy are protected by copyright. 
The content must not have been previously published and cannot be republished 
without the permission of the journal’s copyright holder. The copyright holder is 
Oklahoma State University.

Authors are responsible for obtaining copyright permission for the use of images in 
their papers. Original images created by the author are acceptable, and copyright 
access to the Oklahoma State University image archive is available to the journal 
and its authors. In most cases, authors will be seeking image permissions and are 
asked secure image permissions on their own before submitting their paper for 
review.

submission guidelines



Public Space. The Real and the Ideal. Editorial
André Patrão, Hans Teerds, Christoph Baumberger & Tom Spector

Public Space. Conflicts and Antinomies
Sven-Olov Wallenstein

On the Political, Public Space and the Possibility of a Critical Architecture
Chantal Mouffe

The Space of Appearance within the Megalopolis. 
Architectural Culture-Politics of São Paulo 1957-2017

Kenneth Frampton

A Site of Struggle. 
An Interview with Margaret Crawford

Hans Teerds

Architectural Responsibilities and the Right to a City
Saul Fisher

Property, Necessity and Housing. 
Reconsidering the Situated Right to a Place to Be

Erika Brandl

Anonymity in Jianghu. Hong Kong’s Urban Space in Times of Crisis
Esther Lorenz

Parametric Design in the Historic Urban Domain. 
The Case of Eleftheria Square by Zaha Hadid Architects 

Stella Evangelidou

What Architecture Does. 
An Embodied Approach Towards the Impact of the Built Environment

Margit van Schaik

On Foot. Embodied Atmospheres
Andreea Mihalache

the journal of the International Society 

for the Philosophy of Architecture

volume 6

number 1/2

issn 2372-0883

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	Vol 6_Cover_DEF_OKT-2.pdf
	ArchitecturePhilosophy_Vol6_Backmatter.pdf
	ArchitecturePhilosophy_Vol6_DIGI.pdf
	Vol 6_Cover_DEF-back.pdf
	ArchitecturePhilosophy_Vol6.pdf




