While explaining how Vitruvius invented“architecture” in his Ten Books on Architecture, Pier-Vittorio Aureli(2013) mentions that already at this very starting point, the project is separated from the act of building. Vitruvius uses two terms, fabrica and ratiocinatio. While fabrica is about the crafts and making of architecture, ratiocinatio is about how architecture will be projected as a discourse. This separation of projecting and making would centuries later lead to another separation between the architect and the builder. During the invention of the“architect” Alberti insisted on the architect’s distance from the construction site. Himself not setting foot on the building site of Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, and asking the mason workers to come to Rome(Tavernor, 1998) to discuss the details of construction technique was an expression of his clear position as a thinker and not a maker. This separation of architecture between projecting and making leads to two main phenomena: first giving architecture more meaning than its physical reality as a project that can be read socially, politically and culturally; second alienating architects from the making of architecture by freeing them of responsibilities regarding its material reality. While the first phenomenon is instrumental for the architecture of the commons, the latter is challenged by transforming the position of the architect.
Prefiguration and Architecture as a Project
Prefiguration is about making the world one wants to live in the here and now. Despite the wider reality of the existing power structures, one or a group of people tests other ways of living, acknowledging the limits of their experiment. According to Carl Boggs(1977), who coined the term, prefiguration is“the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.” The experiment itself and the world it aims to generate by this experiment are one and the same. Creating spatial commons is a prefigurative practice. Generating a space in which a community shares and manages the resources and the space itself is an act of commoning, and the way the resources are shared and managed is defined by protocols, created, adjusted and readapted by the same group of people. The process of making and sustaining these protocols gives the space its prefigurative character since the community would be testing the future they want to live in.
Prefiguration can be read as a project towards the future. Similarly, the architectural project is a spatial vision that is yet to come. Like the future itself, the project is laden with social, cultural and political ambitions. In the project, there is more than the representative - visual- materiality of this future; the new value systems and power structures that the future space would like to create come into play as well.“If practicing the project means putting forward something that does not exist yet, such an act of anticipation has taken the form of all those means-plans, drawings, images, texts- that are necessary in order to construct the vision of a future reality. Yet it is exactly as anticipation of a reality yet to come that the project is also a reality in itself.”(Aureli, 2013, p. 12) The anticipation of architecture and the future systems it will bring to life together form the project interwovenly.
Projecting architecture can be instrumental in the making of spatial commons since the projective nature of architecture converges with the prefigurative nature of the commons. In prefigurative politics means and ends become one, and it aims“in its form, not to reproduce the structures and practices of that which is struggled against, but rather to create the sort of social relations which are desired”(Holloway, 2002, pp. 153-154). In the architecture of the commons the co-creation of the space as an other way of organizing spaces, society and governance structures becomes a reality in itself as a project. Through the making of this space, the role of architecture is more than providing a background for commoning activities, it also becomes the main instrument through which another future is imagined.“…what makes space a means to control both the shared experiences and their representations, gives space the power to shape possible experiences”(Stavrides, 2018, p. 336). The dualistic relationship between architecture and society signifies that society shapes architecture while architecture also shapes society itself. As part of the cultural production that plays a role in defining“the distribution of the sensible”(Rancière, 2002), architecture has the potential to set the norms of what is considered acceptable in terms of production, use and transformation of spaces.
Reading architecture of the commons through the lens of prefiguration reveals that prefiguration is a strategy for social change that rests on acting which aims to achieve a radically different socio-spatial practice. So, the architecture of the commons in this sense envisions social change together with spatial change through enactment, in the now and for the future. In the case of the Gezi Park protests and occupation of the park in 2013, one of the main shared values of the various groups of people was solidarity. The Gezi Park protest emerged as a reaction against the privatisation of public space in the heart of Istanbul and spread out throughout many cities of the country as a reflection of the struggle against the oppressive state. During some months until the encampment was destroyed by the police, solidarity was crucial against the police violence as well for the future of the park we wanted to bring to life via discussions in open forums. From this concept of solidarity, the encampment in the park took shape spatially. Free speech stages, open kitchens, free medical support units, a shared library were set, while some places were left clear of these functions as well as tents to make room for wide forums. During the course of the protest, people set up the park in the way they would like to use it in the future, with facilities that would support public life and generate solidarity. What was dreamed for the future of the park was realised in the here and now via self-appointed and self-organised forums and facilitation groups. Direct democracy processes and non-horizontal decision-making mechanisms were as important as the protest and encampment itself. During many conversations in open forums, people were explicit about correcting each other in order not to reproduce the oppressive or authoritarian governance structures that the protest itself was already fighting against.
In this context, the architecture of the commons as a project is deeply rooted in the relationality and interconnectedness of the cultural and natural nexus. Striving for social justice, inclusivity, and sustainability. It challenges systems of domination, exploitation, and exclusion, aiming to create novel types of spaces and equal relationships between society, urban space and the environment. The architecture of the commons as a project calls for equitable access to resources, participation in decision-making processes, and the recognition, representation and redistribution of diverse perspectives and knowledge systems.
This approach brings in a sense of responsibility towards the urban space as a shared resource. According to this standpoint, architecture as a shared resource does not only belong to the current generation of humans of the dominant cultures but also to future generations, minorities and diverse members of society as well as to trees, animals and other members of the ecosystems. Furthermore, different from“architecture as a project” understood in terms of“paper architecture”, change and transformation are not understood and practised solely as an intellectual exercise or theoretical speculation. Prefiguring the architecture of the commons as a project is a pragmatic and performative act which requires active engagement and participation.
Prefiguration includes experimentation“as an attempt to reorganise or reimagine practices”(Yates, 2015, p. 14). Even though the community practising prefiguration knows what kind of a social structure they do not wish to live in, the specificity of the aimed new social structure may be undefined, or rather left open to be defined in the process. David Graeber(2002) emphasizes that a complex society functioning according to other principles than today’s cannot be known through thought exercises. So how this new society will function needs to be tested, practised and changed over time when deemed necessary. This experimental process of prefiguration is also central to the commons. In commons, the protocols for sharing the resources are renegotiated over time, for the well-being of both the community and the resources. In this sense architecture of the commons as a prefigurative practice is an open process which encompasses constant“in-becoming” which creates other worlds at every other moment.
Protocols in becoming and spatial potentials
The obscurity of the details of the new world a community would like to live in can be overcome with protocols in becoming through perpetual experimentation. In the architecture of the commons, this means that the use, organisation and qualities of the space in which the commoning activities are taking shape are also bound to change. As discussed in the previous article, the architecture of the commons is not only a spatial realm that provides a background for commoning but it is also the enabler of them. While architecture becomes commons, commons also becomes architecture. In this regard, the changing protocols of the commons define and redefine the architecture of the commons.
Even though it is not possible to name a specific architect for the temporary spatial organisation at Gezi Park during the summer of 2013, the incremental process of occupation is evident. During the first days the occupation aimed only at bodily presence in the park to ensure that the trees not to be torn down, people camped in and around the zone where the heavy equipment had entered the park priorly. With the escalation of police violence, the encampment became a space of solidarity among the protestors and also people who didn't bodily join the protests but yet wanted to support the movement. In various phases of the protest, the park hosted tents-with their mobile feature could help the organisation of the space, such as moving to a different location if an opening is required for some specific functions-, a stage-set in the first days to gather people in the park and get some attention and then quickly taken away to gave space to more tents-, a first-aid space-located at an easily accessible corner towards the outer perimeter of the park to treat people who suffered from police violence-, a library-emerged during some weeks when police action deescalated during the day and people could spend some peaceful time in the park-, a kitchen-at the middle of the park receiving donations from people who wanted to support the movement-, an open microphone-made up of police barricades and located at a symbolic location where the police entered the park to take down trees-, a forum-which was mobile depending on the availability of a wide space for internal gatherings.
Working with changing(spatial) protocols requires another type of design attitude compared to the conventional architectural production mechanisms of today. Conventionally, a design brief is set from the beginning, so are the budget, the timing of the construction and the architects to work with. There are few changes in the process, yet these are mostly due to managerial decisions, and the aim is to work towards the inauguration of the building. In the architecture of the commons, in its constant in-becoming character, the inauguration is unclear, so are the limits of interference of the architects on site. This has some consequences on the presence of the architect, and the ambiguity of the project.
Above we described how the practice of architecture is divided into projecting and making, and its effect on the prefigurative aspect of architecture. The same division has another effect: namely the alienation of the architect from the making of architecture. The withdrawal of the architect from the construction site also meant withdrawal from the responsibilities of the material and immaterial processes of extraction and exploitation in the(re)production of buildings.
“Certainly serious reflection on labor in architecture today must entail a recognition that buildings begin in both embodied and disembodied—material and immaterial— production, not just in architects’ designs but also in raw materials from the ground and bodies on the construction site; and they also end there, in physical objects located in actual places as well as in images or“effects” that enter into a cycle of future reproduction and commodification. Nor is the architect’s labor just a finite moment in this chain of production; it is implicated in both immediate and deferred ways at every stage of the building’s existence.”
Here Joan Oackman(2015, p. xxiv) summarises how crucial it is for architects to stay on the site of architectural production, not only during construction but also in its use phase. In a way, this is contradictory to Alberti's conception of the architect, which has defined the conventional role of the architect for more than six centuries. According to him, the responsibility of the construction site belongs to carpenters, builders on site; the architect is responsible for the vision he/she wants to project on the building(Anstey, 2005). We see the effects of this thinking explicitly in architectural production in countries with problematic labour conditions, such as Gulf countries or post-Soviet Turkic states while the developed countries in Europe are also not exempt from it. When interviewed about 882 migrant deaths in the construction sites of the World Cup in Qatar, Zaha Hadid said she had“nothing to do with the workers”(Riach, 2014). The various subcontracting schemes, non-humanitarian migration laws and withdrawal of architects from the construction site and its responsibilities come all together and end up in numerous workers' deaths on the construction sites, along with many other problems of extraction and exploitation. We will not delve deeper into the problematics of the construction sites and their invisible actors here yet it was crucial to briefly unfold the effects of the division of architect's work between projecting and making.
In the architecture of the commons, the constant in-becoming modus operandi of the spatial organisation demands the convergence of projecting and making. The prefigurative experiment in real space needs to be readjusted and reconfigured either by the same architect or another, or even better by the community itself. In most cases, the architects who play a role in the generation of the commons tend to stay as part of the community, while the openness of the design enables other actors to shape and reshape the common space(Van Reusel, 2019). The architecture of the commons always being in its becoming state, intervened by various actors generates ambiguity. While the new social systems are being tested in the here and now, their final form is not predefined, so the commons can be a real project of collective radical imagination(Haiven, 2020). Ambiguity helps us to“destabilize normativity”(Frayne, 2022, p. 152). Ambiguity helps the commoners to avoid reproducing the conventions of the existing social system, which is considered one complete and ultimate way of living. This stance has been best phrased as“It’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world”(Fisher, 2009, p. 1). Ambiguity offers an open play-field for dreaming and acting as if that dream has come true while refining it.
The architecture of the commons and knowledge commons are both social constructions. Different from natural resources these commons are human-made. Thus their governance models are different from the natural resources. Cultural commons, or the new commons as Charlotte Hess(2008) defines them, are non-rivalrous:“their use by one individual does not merely fail to diminish its utility for others, but in many cases actually augments it.”(Dardot & Laval, 2019, p. 106) The constant in-becoming mode of protocols is more about prefiguring the protocols of the other world that is being dreamed of and is less about securing that the resource is not depleted. In other words, in new commons, it is less about the survival of the community which is dependent on the shared resources, but more about altering the existing systems of redistribution and recognition(Fraser, 2003).
Prefiguration and Architecture as a Project
Protocols in becoming and spatial potentials