What Can We Do With(out) Action?

More than five years after the global financial collapse, architecture is still waking up with a hangover. As we continue to grasp for effective ways to bring our disciplinary knowledge to bear on the challenges of global urbanization, social justice, and climate change, architects remain caught in the limited field of possibilities delineated by earlier academic and professional discourses. Even if we have passed through the “semantic nightmare”[i] of postmodernism, played out the self-referential indulgences of autonomous architecture, and awakened from the decade-long fever dream of “postcritical” production, we still seem to find ourselves without a normative framework for what can be done with architecture, and in particular, what architecture can do for the city.[ii] 

A whole host of architects and urban theorists have offered a response to this paradoxical state by positing various forms of direct action as alternatives to these perceived ideological dead ends of theory and practice.  The energy and interest devoted to these explorations is both admirable and formidable, and rather than address the entire terrain of thinking and writing that has developed, I have selected a particular work that I argue is somehow symptomatic of the various texts and positions that have been fielded within the discourse to date.  I will take the liberty of using criticism of this text as an opportunity to elucidate these positions and unpack the possibilities and pitfalls that they represent.

Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi’s Actions: What You Can Do with the City[iii] is a prime subject, offering us not only a milestone event and publication within discourse, but also a transect of the various writers and actors plying this field.

In this article, I argue that we must more closely interrogate Actions and peel back the layers of hype to ask how these activities can actually lead to new forms of material practice in architecture. This is a question that the mini-movement coalescing around guerilla urbanism has so far failed to adequately address; these exciting and vivid examples of crowd-sourced urbanism are too often taken at face value as being inherently good and not critically assessed for their potential to address the enormity and seriousness of urban challenges. Like the proponents of Everyday Urbanism, its prophets focus on finding alternative meanings and interpretations of the city and avoid any deep responsibility for how the shaping of physical space can engage the forces of urbanization at an adequate scale.[iv] How can this everyday urbanism, operating in the “fine grain” of the public realm, ever add up to more than the sum of its parts and truly improve societal norms?