(This podcast is in Spanish)

The notion that public space is for everyone, a place where we are all equal, has been used ambivalently to legitimize the exclusion of marginalized and vulnerable populations and to defend their presence in these spaces. Authorities and other social groups, uncomfortable with the presence of the homeless, loitering teenagers, street vendors, sex workers, and protesters, among other ‘undesirables,’ tend to justify their expulsion from public space by appealing to the “public good” or the prevention of “social harm.” The use of public space as a strategy for either “social justice” or “social order” led geographer Bernd Belina to question the pervasive use of this idealized notion of public space and its abstract promise of equality as a vehicle for social change. Instead, he argued, it might be more important to ask “why the ‘reserve army of labour' as a socioeconomic reality and its feared visible presence in urban spaces as a moral problem exist in the first place.” For him, such a stance would direct the conversation towards how our current economic model often entails the punishment of the poor and move us from the idealism of public space towards identifying concrete demands and struggles of specific marginalized populations.

This is precisely what the Colombian NGO Temblores, which translates to quakes, has been doing in Colombia since 2016. Founded by siblings Alejandro and Sebastián Lanz, Temblores works in the realm of what they refer to as Strategic Community Litigation. Through this approach, they have worked with homeless, trans communities, and protesters, identifying their concrete struggles and making a case to change the structures that maintain the exclusion, violence, and discrimination and the systematic negation of their rights. In the work of this NGO, equality is not an abstract aspiration that carries within a normativized way of being. On the contrary, their work refers to very concrete lives at stake whose right to access and inhabit public spaces have been persistently denied, criminalized, and subjected to police violence. 

For example, Temblores proved that the lack of free public restrooms in Colombian cities and the prohibition of public urination and defecation in the Police Code affected citizens and particularly harmed habitantes de calle, peoples whose private lives take place in the public realm. (Rather than homeless, in Spanish, this term refers to people who inhabit the streets). The code led to extreme violence by police officers. At least twelve habitantes were murdered while urinating or defecating. Temblores has also actively worked with trans communities in Bogota, finding that, despite new inclusive public policies, trans people continue to be targeted by the police and others when entering public spaces and that these assaults tend to be dismissed by authorities who blame the victims as inciting the violence due to their own physical appearance. Furthermore, the collective showed that the right to protest publicly, particularly by peasants, indigenous communities, and students, has been curtailed and violently repressed through the militarization of protest with the Escuadron Móviles Antidisturbios Esmad (Mobile Anti-riot Squad), whose presence at demonstrations has become pervasive, leading to police abuse and the outright violation of human rights. 

Temblores' work is not academic research but rather a series of substantial cases made in collaboration with affected populations. They produce evidence to litigate in the justice system, tools for policymakers and authorities, and accessible documents to be shared and discussed with the wider public. The collective has had some wins. The Constitutional Court forbade public authorities from indicting habitantes de calle and demanded cities provide free public restrooms; the latter of which remains to be enforced by city authorities. 

In all of these cases, the struggle for public space involves the police, the main actor in charge of overseeing and managing public conduct in Colombia and, therefore, the first institution that requires a structural transformation. Temblores has elevated to Congress a strong case against systematic police violence. In 2019, as part of their call for “Reforma Policial Ya,” (Police Reform Now) Temblores launched Grita! (Yell!), a collective platform that invites citizens to register and denounce police violence and offers legal counselling for those affected. 

In the midst of the unprecedented and massive protests that spread across both cities and rural areas on April 28th, the Failed Architecture team organized Situation #3 in Bogota to talk to Temblores. Temblores, along with other NGOs, has become a key and reliable source of information at this time, gathering testimonies and reporting the widespread police violence. According to their latest report, the protests have led to 43 murders, many or all of which can be traced back to police forces, 346 disappeared persons, as well as at least 3,405 cases of police violence, including 22 victims of sexual violence, 1,450 arbitrary detentions and 47 victims of eye mutilation with rubber pellets. 

While the initial cause of the protests was a  government tax reform, its roots can be traced at least as far back as the earlier wave of protests in 2019. Then, the grievances centred on the failed social, economic, and environmental policies of the elected right-wing government, its reluctance to implement the peace agreements with the FARC (Latin America’s oldest guerrilla), and the systematic murders of social leaders throughout the country. These grievances have since only intensified, with the economic devastation brought by the COVID pandemic in a country that already was one of the most unequal in the world. Now, protesters have successfully derailed the tax bill and declared an indefinite strike. While mainly pacific and rich in cultural demonstrations and initiatives from young people, peasants, and indigenous communities, among other groups, there have also been violent clashes, some involving armed (paramilitary) civilians siding with the police.

FA Bogota talked to anthropologist Alejandro Rodríguez, coordinator of Temblores’ platform Grita!. The conversation also included Camilo Andrés Méndez and Nicolas Fernández, who are part of a collective of architecture and design students who have joined the protests in Bogota, as well as Carolina Álvarez, a civil engineer working in the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety. The dialogue revolved around Temblores’ research and litigation processes in their quest to defend the right to the city. Among the main topics discussed was the potential of collective work; the negation of public spaces caused by the mix of social distance measures imposed by authorities to face the pandemic; the recent decentralization of protests across neighbourhoods and “resistance posts;” as well as the police violence taking place mostly at nights, along with targeted electricity cuts and internet blockages. This latter situation led Temblores to make the hard choice of recommending protesters to leave the streets and take shelter by night. While this curtails the right to the city, for the NGO, this call is intended to preserve a fundamental right (the right to live) from the deadly aggression of government forces.

Alongside the dialogue, Situation # 3 included a collective public action in the streets of Bogota. The FA team produced a series of posters designed by editor Maria Mazzanti and installed them across various public spaces in Bogota. The almost extinct art of wheat pasting as a medium of communication has declined in this digital era. Public authorities have restricted it only to designated areas in a bid to prevent ‘visual pollution.’ In the wake of protests, this medium has flourished as a way to express the voices of protesters, leaving evidence of this social movement across cities. Editors Juan Sebastián Sepúlveda and Laura Buitagro went out to the streets to share the posters with protesters and sent some to Espacio Odeón’s proposal to build a memory of the strike in a collective wall. With the help of printer Adolfo Ayala, owner of Carteles Bogota, the FA team used this medium to underscore our constitutional right to protest peacefully and the right to inhabit, transform and produce the city during day and night. 

Heroin is an urban thing. That's the image we've been fed by movies, music, literature, news, public service announcements, and school curricula ever since it became a subject of moral panic over a century ago. The problem is, heroin was only ever a drug of the city because this image has focused almost entirely on the (historically very urban) point of consumption. What has been left out is a whole geography of production and distribution that has tended to encompass large and often very rural parts of East, South-East and Southwest Asia where the opium poppy could be cultivated. Now, the image continues to distract us from the fact that heroin users can no longer support themselves in urban centres, our modern globalised world having long since forced all but the most economically productive subjects from the centre of cities, and out to the periphery, while at the same time still managing to support supply chains that can bring heroin, and all manner of other opioids, to even the most far-flung places.

By hiding this more extensive geography and focusing instead on the individual and the urban, this representation of heroin has prevented a proper confrontation with the often very intentional harm caused to vast swathes of humanity who have been exposed to the drug over the past century. For this episode, therefore, we’re going to zoom out, and try to connect the dots between some of the disparate spaces and places that have been touched by heroin, exploring some of the main historical shifts in where heroin is produced, who uses it, how it gets to the places where it’s used, and why it ends up in these places.

• Sonja Groot Obbink gives tours of Amsterdam's Red Light District, she is a former sex worker in recovery from addiction to heroin and cocaine. She lives in Amsterdam.
• Sam Quinones is a freelance journalist and author who lives in Southern California. Contact him through his website.
• Prof. Andrew Hussey, Andrew Hussey OBE is Paris-based English historian of French culture. His writing is focused primarily on 20th century French history.

This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes//The Failed Architecture Team

References:

"This is Your Brain on Drugs"

"Heroin Screws You Up"

Vangelis, "Prologue" Blade Runner soundtrack

Trainspotting (1996) opening scene

Tam Stewart, The Heroin Users, Pandora Press, 1996

Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs, Brookings Institution Press, 2010

Trainspotting (1996) final scene

Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, Bloomsbury, 2015

The Connection (1961) whole film

Eric C. Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City, Penn Press, 2013

Penn Press Podcast, S01E04 "Eric C. Schneider Smack: Heroin and the American City"

"Heroin" BBC Radio 4 documentary

Velvet Underground, "Heroin" from "Velvet Underground and Nico" LP

Velvet Underground, "Sunday Morning" from "Velvet Underground and Nico" LP

Velvet Underground, "I'm Waiting for the Man" from "Velvet Underground and Nico" LP

Burroughs: The Movie (1983) whole film

The Drug Years (2006) excerpt on heroin and the Vietnam War

Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Lawrence Hill Books, 2003

Henrik Krüger & Jerry Meldon, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism, Trine Day, 2015

"Wisdom Teeth Bringing Opioid Addiction Danger?" CBS New York, 2019

In the episode, they talk about the ways in which the municipality, developers and various old white dudes are conspiring to frame the neighbourhood as an “urban jungle” and pushing to replace it with a “monumental garden”. Against these moves, René has written a counter-manifesto, “Wallen 2020”, which is intended to galvanise resistance to the neighbourhood’s creeping sanitisation.

Having connected through recent movements on work seed distribution and community gardens in the midst of the BLM protests, kuwa jasiri and FA’s Christin HU share recent personal experiences and current work, as well as thoughts on the unanimous city council vote in Asheville, North Carolina (US).

Kiruna is experiencing one of the biggest urban transformation projects in recent history. The city is being relocated by three kilometres due to the expansion of a mine, around which Kiruna was built. A third of the population must relocate, housing blocks and landmark buildings are being demolished or moved, and a new city is taking shape.

This episode reflects on that debate, in order to explore the wider relationship between buildings and power, questioning how a building like the Louvre comes to be invested with power, but also, how its seemingly immutable marriage of social and architectural order can be challenged by the sheer defiant presence of the historically excluded, doing something new in that space. With some time passed since the video’s release, we’ll be reflecting on its impact on the Louvre, what it expresses about the museum’s position in contemporary society and what it portends for the future of museum spaces in general.

– Sarah Huny Young is a creative director, artist/photographer, and New Yorker based in Pittsburgh, PA
– Heidi Herrera is an art historian based at the University of California
– Christopher Dickey is World Correspondent at the Daily Beast
– Paige K.Bradley is a New York-based artist and writer, and an editor for Artforum.com

This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes/the Failed Architecture team.

In light of this new reality, for this episode we’ll be talking to architectural workers from the UK, the USA, and Brazil, about the role a labour union could play in the contemporary architectural profession. We’ll discuss the difficulties, limits and challenges of organizing architectural workers and speculate as to why architects have, until recently, been relatively absent from the history of the labour movement. We’ll also consider how unionisation could give ordinary architectural workers greater control over the buildings and spaces they design as well as over the wider spatial production sector.

– Keefer Dunn is an architect based in Chicago and a national organiser for the Architecture Lobby
– Fernanda Simon Cardoso is an architect based in São Paulo and a former Director for the FNA (Federação Nacional dos Arquitetos e Urbanistas)
– Sam and Alex are architectural workers based in the UK and organisers for Workers Inquiry: Architecture

This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes/Jake Soule/the Failed Architecture team.

In this episode, we discuss with various experts how this rising number of pilgrims is fueling a radical makeover of the city. While Mecca has always been changing and under construction, the current developments are of an unprecedented scale. What does Mecca’s radical makeover look like? Who is profiting from these developments and what does it mean for the city’s spiritual character? What does the current building craze mean for older buildings, and what will happen to the hundreds of thousands of people who live in the city’s informal settlements?

– Ameneh Solati is an architect and urban researcher based in London, until recently working with Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut
– Hussam Dakkak is an architectural designer and one of the founders of the Architectural Association’s Visiting School to Mecca

This episode was directed by René Boer/the Failed Architecture team.

Unlike the visual, sound cannot be so easily contained, it flows freely, stimulating memories, helping to create a collective urban experience and bridging gaps across space and time. As such, recording and discussing the built environment through the medium of sound offers a vital means through which to challenge the dominant ways in which architecture and cities are represented. The main part of this episode comprises a conversation between hosts Mark, Rene and Charlie, unpacking the work involved in producing a podcast about architecture and discussing what it means to represent architecture through sound and how music, in particular, can convey certain urban moods. But in the breaks, we will also introduce a series of other sounds found on Aporee, an online map tool on which people can post geo-located sounds.

This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes/the Failed Architecture team.

While his is an extreme example, it offers a compelling jumping off point to explore the wider issue of an architect’s responsibility for the wider system that they work in. Moving from mid-20th Century Germany to the present day, this episode explores the specific role certain architects have played in developing the stadiums and infrastructure for the 2022 Qatar World Cup. Here, gross violations of human rights and international labour law throw up serious questions about the moral ramifications of designing projects in such a country. How can architects balance the benefit of bringing a smooth, shiny new project against the human cost required to produce it?

— Thomas Rogers works as a freelance journalist, editor and translator in Berlin, often for SPIEGEL International.
— Nicholas McGeehan is a Gulf researcher who has worked at Human Rights Watch as the Bahrain, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates researcher and at Mafiwasta, an organisation for workers’ rights in the United Arab Emirates, where he was also director.

This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes/the Failed Architecture team.

In this episode, we join Incompiuto on a trip to one of the largest unfinished objects, ‘La Diga di Blufi’, 130km south of Palermo. Construction of this impressive water engineering project, which was supposed to supply southern Sicily with drinking water, was abruptly halted in the 1990s and has since become a 260-hectare contemporary ruin. Together with architects and artists involved in the project, we discuss the many implications of the ‘Incompiuti’, from their poetic qualities to the planning failures, from ruin porn to the need for spiritual structures, all the while contemplating architecture’s illusion of completion.

– Veronica Caprino is an architect based in Milan and part of Fosbury Architecture
– Andrea Masu is an artist, currently based in Palermo. He is part of the Alterazioni Video collective and one of the founders of Incompiuto Siciliano

This episode was directed by Mark Minkjan en René Boer/the Failed Architecture team.

The media hype following these events prompted a large number of aid workers, activists, volunteers, but also architects to make their way to Calais. For this episode, we talk to a few of them to find out what in particular triggered them to go, what they encountered and what they did. How should architects relate to these large, self-built areas? Is it possible to make a positive contribution in such a complex environment? Should ‘architecture’ be the focus of these violent border systems? And is there a need to document or archive such self-built cities?

– Grainne Hassett is a Dublin-based architect, who initiated various construction projects in Calais as well as worked on an extensive documentation project.
– Léopold Lambert is based in Paris, where he is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Funambulist, a magazine that continues to critically reflect on complex spatial-political situations such as Calais.
– Merve Bedir is an architect, now based in Hong Kong, and has over the last few years been involved in different locations on the ‘migrant trail’ between Syria and Calais.

This episode was directed by René Boer/the Failed Architecture team.

Casting a long shadow over this subject, as well as Gaika’s own work, the 2011 London Riots occupy a significant part of the initial discussion. Both Ash and Gaika speculate on the conditions which caused the riots and consider their implications for the future of the city, as well as society more generally. From there, we move on to discuss London’s relative stability and the value of insurrectionary moments to a progressive urban politics, along the way making references to, among other things, defensible space, One Hyde Park, gnostic fantasies, that Redrow advert, and the ironic lightness of a possible communism that is not definable in any way.

This episode was directed by Charlie Clemoes/the Failed Architecture team.

In this episode, Alexandra Lange talks to Mark Minkjan about architecture criticism and The Design of Childhood. In the first half of the conversation, they discuss her work as a critic, the problem with architect profiles, writing for the New Yorker and feminist criticism. After that, the second half is about how to design the objects, spaces and cities that help children become independent, sociable and creative.

This episode was directed by Mark Minkjan/the Failed Architecture team.

While architecture from that era is still being demolished at a large scale, this renewed interest is Modernist architecture has also allowed investors to renovate entire blocks of it, and sell the individual apartments for lucrative prices. One of the last remaining Bijlmer flats, Kleiburg, went through a similar process, which was later even given the Mies van der Rohe Award and other major architecture prizes. For this episode, we revisit Kleiburg with Fenna Haakma Wagenaar, an architect who grew up in the flat, and discuss the simultaneous disregard and reappreciation of Modernist housing estates with critical expert Owen Hatherley.

– Fenna Haakma Wagenaar is an architect and currently design lead at the Municipality of Amsterdam. She grew up in Kleiburg.
– Owen Hatherley is an architectural historian and author of such books as Militant Modernism, A New Kind of Bleak and The Ministry of Nostalgia.
– SBMG (Sawtu Boys Money Gang) consists of rappers Chivv and Henkie T; their music video Oeh Na Na features in the episode and was largely shot in and around Kleiburg.

This episode is directed by René Boer/the Failed Architecture team.

But while it’s long been accepted that film, music and other established forms of culture have been instrumental in crafting people’s perception of city life, the role of video games has hitherto been rather neglected. This, despite the fact that the industry is in many countries bigger than film and music combined. If we do not accept the wide-ranging and increasingly significant role that video games have in shaping the way people interact with city space, then we leave it open to conservative or reactionary portrayals of city life and space more generally.

– Oli Mould is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, he blogs at Tacity
– Rosa Carbo-Mascarell is a game designer and co-founder of Games for the Many
– Darran Anderson is a writer and author of Imaginary Cities and the forthcoming Tidewrack
– Hannah Nicklin is a writer, narrative designer and game designer with a PhD in games influenced theatre and theatre influenced games

This episode is directed by Charlie Clemoes/the Failed Architecture team.

This episode was triggered by our encounter with the first data centre to be fully embraced as Architecture. Designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects, the AM4 data tower in Amsterdam only recently appeared on the city’s skyline. Being taller than most buildings in the city, and cutting an impressively slick, windowless appearance, the data skyscraper is hard to miss. Does this design treatment for data architecture signal a tipping point of data centres becoming more visible and acceptable elements of cities? For the podcast, we got inside the heavily secured AM4 data tower to see, hear and feel the internet, and talked to several people about data space.

– Michiel Eielts is managing director at Equinix, the data centre company that commissioned the building.
– Joost Vos is architect and partner at Benthem Crouwel Architects, who designed the AM4 data tower.
– Ingrid Burrington is an artist and a journalist for a.o. The Atlantic. Her work deals with invisible infrastructures such as the internet.
– Alexander Taylor is a social anthropologist at the University of Cambridge who looks at the social, political and infrastructural dimensions of data security. For Failed Architecture, Alexander has also written the article Failover Architectures: the Infrastructural Excess of the Data Centre Industry.

This episode is directed by Mark Minkjan / the Failed Architecture team.