Agamben Giorgio - The ethics of a potential urbanism : critical encounters between Giorgio Agamben and architecture

How can architecture deactivate its preoccupations with the arrogant ego of creative power and be of use for an urban life without a final destination? This is the question addressed in this most erudite and inventive mobilization of Agambens work. Boano takes a major step in rendering inoperative the prevailing suppositions and practices that keep urbanism from being something else, now.

Abdoumalique Simone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany

This book offers more than an original contribution to the field; it opens a true debate that can no longer be ignored.

Francesco Careri, Roma Tre University, Italy

This book examines the relevance of Giorgio Agambens political writings for architecture and urban design and carefully guides the reader through Agambens fascinating ethical and political vocabulary. The book rethinks notions such as use, productivity, and creation that are, in the design disciplines, often taken for granted. It recognises, perhaps provocatively but convincingly so, in inoperative architecture a genuine route towards a political and ethical design practice. This book offers a timely contribution to the debates on the social responsibility of architectural and urban design, and a must-read for scholars interested in the emancipatory and transformative agency of design.

Isabelle Doucet, The University of Manchester, UK

For all those of us concerned with a truly alternative project for architecture, Boanos work is not only enlightening but also timely. His reading of Agamben from an architectural point of view certainly goes beyond proposing the paradox of making philosophy operative by rendering architecture inoperative: it also sheds light on a possible way out of the anti-intellectual trend that pervades contemporary architecture. Instead of a new style or another slogan to feed the industry of architecture, Boanos proposal looks for a renewed ethics which, precisely in a discipline that forgot about this word, will surely open up unexpected and yet amazing new avenues for architectural debate.

Francisco Daz, The Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and
Editor in Chief of ARQ Magazine, Santiago, Chile

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agambens political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agambens politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agambens oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical encounter with architectures aesthetic-political function.

Camillo Boano is an architect and urbanist. He is Senior Lecturer at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College of London (UCL), where he directs the MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development. He is also co-director of the UCL Urban Laboratory.

Design and the Built Environment

Series editor: Matthew Carmona

This series provides a means to disseminate substantive research in urban design and its allied fields. Contributions are welcomed which are the result of original empirical research, scholarly evaluation, reflection on the practice and the process of urban design, critical analysis of particular aspects of the built environment, or important conference proceedings. Volumes should be of international interest, although they may focus on the particular experience and practice in one country. They may reflect theory and practice from across one or more of the spatial scales over which urban design operates.

Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space

Miodrag Mitrasinovic

The Design of Frontier Spaces: Control and Ambiguity

Carolyn Loeb and Andreas Luescher

Urban Design in the Arab World: Reconceptualizing Boundaries

Robert Saliba

Towns and Cities, Function in Form: Urban Structures, Economics and Society

Julian Hart

Urban Planning in Lusophone African Countries: Urban Planning in North Africa

Carlos Nunes Silva

Spatial Cultures: Towards a New Social Morphology of Cities Past and Present

Sam Griffiths and Alexander von Lnen

The Social Fabric of Cities

Vinicius Netto

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism: Critical Encounters between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture

Camillo Boano

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism

Critical Encounters between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture

Camillo Boano

To Elena, Beatrice and Francesca

Contents

Part I
Agambens burning house

Part II
Giorgio Agambens oeuvre

Part III
Towards an inoperative architecture

I wish to thank all those who accompanied me on the long and at times unthinkable journey toward the completion of this book. I first began to think about this book during my directorship of the MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development, at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. The fertile, collective, challenging and profoundly radical environment I encountered there was conductive of many reflections contained in this book. Thanks are due to the director of the Unit, Julio Davila, who allowed me to devote some time in a sabbatical term to develop most of the pages that will follow, and to all of the Development Planning Unit fellows for their support and encouragement.