The book discusses the ways in which the project can critically contribute to an affirmative biopolitical action of substantial emancipation; it considers space an essential agent, and not only a collective capital, or a support, for adapting our lives to the recent profoundly changed conditions. In all the new research on the future of urban space, the renewed interest in life, tragically affected by health, ecological and socio-political crises, raises a crucial theoretical and projective question: what role can space play in maintaining and promoting life in the broader sense of bíos? This book is based on the conviction that there is an urgent need to revisit the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics - free, however, from the privilege given to the goal of control - to rethink the project of the city and territory in transition in an affirmative and emancipatory way. The 'biopolitical garden' designates both the mental place and the set of concrete spaces in which the critical thinking developed in this book takes place. Profound and original, it starts from a consideration of the modern and contemporary project as one committed to the maintenance and emancipation of a population. Re-reading a series of paradigmatic projects from the twentieth century, Paola Viganò acknowledges the long-term validity of the three fundamental concepts of functional space, natural space, and social space. She then proposes a theoretical renewal that considers the value of space as an agent subject endowed with its own vitality. Finally, the projects developed by the author in recent years provide a laboratory for 'situating' her thinking within a perspective of spatial, social, and environmental justice.

Biopolitical Garden: Space, Life, Transition

Arts & Photography

Viganò, Paola

Architecture

Actar

The two-part Territorialism studio (2012 and 2013) examined the territorial scale and the form of the territory as a basis to understand the contemporary city and the modifications that have occurred in its spatial, economic, and social structure. The studio was based on the premise that the urban field is changing, and ecological rationality can offer fundamental opportunities to intersect and integrate various territorial layers. It focused attention on time, impermanence, and biotic relations, which, through natural dynamics, can permeate all environments. And it operated with the premise that what we perceive as a territory is above all a mental construction inside which territories can be created or erased.

Territorialism (Studio Report)

Harvard University Graduate School of Design

The central hypothesis behind the book concerns the capacity of urban as well as territorial design, of the "project" in the sense of design activity on multiple scales, to produce knowledge. The volume discusses research conducted with design tools and operations, crossing physical and conceptual territories, related to a set of direct design explorations, and to the concept of "research by design." This idea of the project contains, manipulates and produces concepts and forms of concrete action in space, involving interpretation, abstraction and – at times – generalization. It describes and reveals processes of individualization, recognizes situations and allows possibilities to emerge. The project images the future and takes its impact on thinking about the city as the basis for the production of an original form of knowledge. Reflection on the epistemological statutes of the design project, in the wake of the crisis of expert knowledge and in a period of progressive marginalization and simplification of the practice of the architect and of the urban designer, is now fundamental for the rethinking of design’s social role, and to formulate a fresh, new, critical vision of the world.

The Territories of Urbanism: The project as knowledge producer

Science & Math

EPFL Press

The Morphology of Urban Landscapes: History, Analysis, Design

Kropf, Karl

Bideau, Andre

Blain, Catherine

Ghorayeb, Marlene

Komossa, Susanne

Ley, Karsten

Malfroy, Sylvain

Marcus, Lars

Ortelli, Luca

Raith, Erich

Zierau, Frank

Marzot, Nicola

Schobel, Soren

Reimer, Dietrich

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Books by Viganò, Paola