Journal articles by Giovanna Astolfo
Displacement and precarity are two conditions that define our
broken world. Acknowledging that an... more Displacement and precarity are two conditions that define our
broken world. Acknowledging that any rhetoric of fixity, sustainability, and progress is insufficient and that the only choice is to
learn to live with the fragments, the paper reflects on displacement
beyond its common form of non-livability and the absence of
a future. Offering some diffractions across the spatial narratives of
three different territories where we worked – Iquitos in Peru, Bar
Elias-Tell Serhoun in Lebanon, and Hlaingtharyar in Yangon – and
mobilising the critical work of Berlant, Tsing and Agamben, this
paper reframes displacement as the unfinished possibility of inhabiting, a tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtraction of
future, space and possibilities, therefore contributing to the wider
reflection on the challenge of inhabiting the uninhabitable urban
conditions of the present.
Migration and Society: Advances in Research, 2020
Hospitality has become a dominant notion in relation to asylum and immigration. Not only is it of... more Hospitality has become a dominant notion in relation to asylum and immigration. Not only is it oft en used in public and state discourses, it is also prevalent in social analysis, in its ambivalent relationship with hostility and the control and management of population. Grounded in the Derridean suggestion of hospitality as "giving place" (2000: 25), we off er a refl ection on hospitality centered around the notion of inhabitation. Framing hospitality as inhabitation helps to move away from problematic asymmetrical and colonial approaches to migration toward acknowledging the mul-tiplicity of transformative experiences embedded in the city. It also enhances a more nuanced understanding of the complex entanglements of humanitarian dilemmas, ref-ugees' struggle for recognition and their desire for "opacity. " Th is article draws on five years of teaching-based engagement with the reality of refugees and asylum seekers hosted in the Sistema di Protezione Richiedenti Asilo e Rifugiati in Brescia, Italy.
El número de refugiados climáticos en el mundo irá en aumento en las si-guientes décadas debido a... more El número de refugiados climáticos en el mundo irá en aumento en las si-guientes décadas debido a los efectos del cambio climático. Por ello, los re-asentamientos poblacionales serán necesarios con mayor frecuencia, siendo urgente revisar la metodología empleada para su diseño, implementación y monitoreo para promover su sostenibilidad ambiental, social, económica y política. Se presentan en este documento cuatro factores clave (más no exclu-sivos) a ser tomados en cuenta en los procesos de reasentamiento. Estos son: gobernanza y participación; ubicación, diseño urbano y de viviendas; medios de vida y planificación. Se presentan análisis teóricos de estos factores, cómo se manifiestan en el caso de estudio elegido y algunas recomendaciones he
In the face of multiple, complex and contradictory urban phenomena, and the impossibility to defi... more In the face of multiple, complex and contradictory urban phenomena, and the impossibility to define one kind of city/one urbanism, the present short contribution aims to reposition informal urbanism as one of the many existing legitimate processes that are contributing to city building. Over 1 billion people now live in 'slums' or 'informal settlements', a number expected to double by 2030, making what can be labelled 'informal urbanism' globally into the dominant expression of urban form. In our view, architects should formulate appropriate answers in the form of a responsive architecture, an architecture of engagement that has the capacity to reconsider and recalibrate design process within this contemporary urban condition, which could be called 'un-designed' or even 'un-designable'.
Chapters by Giovanna Astolfo
Mapping Crisis Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping, 2020
We witness today the multiplication, dispersion and diversification of urban borders and a vast r... more We witness today the multiplication, dispersion and diversification of urban borders and a vast repertoire of de/re-bordering processes. Simultaneous fortification and dismantling of borders, proliferation and virtualisation of others are some of the processes that characterise the current geography of division and are attributed in turn to globalization, neo-liberalism, welfare crisis, migratory flows, post-colonialism and the post-war on terror. International multidisciplinary community of scholars involved in the so called border studies has highlighted their changing nature in terms of location, function, texture and agency. Borders are considered today ubiquitous, performative and relational. Drawing from recent studies on (state-nation) borders, and at the same time challenging too settled conceptualisations, this essay aims to contribute to the current debate by introducing a new lens to look at urban borders: that of dispositive. New not in term of time of course as its genealogy can go back to Foucault who employs the term - dispositif - analysing contemporary forms of power and governamentality, whose definition has been – more recently being interpreted by Giorgio Agamben. What is a dispositif? What is the difference between Foucault's dispositif and Agamben's dispositio? What happen to urban borders when we look at them through such a lens? Is it possible to compare different border contexts and launch them in a global conversation? The paper attempts to answer such questions to sustain the work developed within the BUDD studio.
Digital resources by Giovanna Astolfo
The role of architectural knowledge visa -vis urban challenges. Nurturing the dialogue between ed... more The role of architectural knowledge visa -vis urban challenges. Nurturing the dialogue between educators and future practitioners-… With more than forty-five participants, the workshop and training " People-centred design " held at Yangon Technological University (YTU) between 13 th-15 th February brought together students, community architects and academics from Yangon, Mandalay, Bangkok and London, consolidating strategic partnerships and adding new layers of engagement between DPU, YTU, Silpakorn University and the Asian Coalition Housing Rights – Community Architects Network. Stemming from a series of discussions emerged last year around the nature and the possibility of an equal partnership, the aim of the three-day multi-target initiative was to support YTU in building the capacity of young professionals and staff to understand and engage with current urban challenges, in particular low income communities' housing problems, while sharing theoretical and methodological insights in light of the three-year engagement with the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development at DPU. People-centred design workshop – final group picture The initiative aimed at fostering the reflexivity of students and staff towards the identification of knowledge needs and pedagogical challenges. The workshop exposed the participants to low income communities, their technologies, practices and agency. While experiencing the city – the 'informal' self-built city – students were tasked to observe and document material and immaterial aspects; as well as reflect upon their positionality. Learning how to critically observe, listen, reflect and narrate ultimately led to re-questioning the role of the practitioner/architect, its attitudes and skills. The training helped participants to reflect on how the new urban question is calling upon the recalibration of the architectural practice, and how this reflects in architectural education in terms of skills/knowledge/attitudes across different pedagogies. Urban challenges such as rapid informal urbanisation and the reproduction of spatial injustice have to be investigated and tackled by embracing a new and radical mode of practice. If challenges are utterly complex, is the old-fashion market-driven technical-based knowledge sufficient? Architecture and urban design should be seen as a series of processes that engage with political and social realities. What type of spatio-political knowledge is required within a studio then? The failure of modern architecture and urbanism in addressing people's needs has shown the limits of thinking the built environment as an authoritative and autonomous discipline. Anyone can build. Anyone can be an architect. Whose creativity counts then? This calls upon re-questioning
The contemporary urbanisation of Amazonas is a geopolitical creation, and a recent phenomenon. Fo... more The contemporary urbanisation of Amazonas is a geopolitical creation, and a recent phenomenon. For long time native communities have been living in sparse, often isolated, settlements. Adapting to the mutable conditions of the river, they created a system based on mobility, economic diversification and ‘multi-sited territorial appropriation’ (Peluso and Alexiadis, 2016). Current state-led relocation plans aimed at reducing flooding risk in informal areas are threatening the traditional spatial organisation of Amazon’s communities, negatively impacting the livelihoods system.
In the backdrop of the so labelled refugee crisis in Europe, recently the Jungle in Calais has be... more In the backdrop of the so labelled refugee crisis in Europe, recently the Jungle in Calais has been partially demolished leaving many displaced. Following the evictions in January and February, that attracted massive media attention and implied multiple forms of resistance the Jungle dwellers and the organisations/volunteers/activists operating in the camp have momentarily withdrawn from taking further action while awaiting for the forthcoming decision from the prefecture: will the northern part of the camp be evicted following the destiny of the southern and western part?
In a famous picture of Phnom Penh in 1979, two children stand in the foreground looking steadily ... more In a famous picture of Phnom Penh in 1979, two children stand in the foreground looking steadily at the camera, while behind them the city, once the 'pearl of Asia', is nothing but a desolated and spectral bunch of abandoned buildings. The urban history of the capital of Cambodia is demarcated by iterative evacuations and expulsions of its population.
The BUDD Fieldtrip engages with urban challenges in informal settlements in Cambodia by experimen... more The BUDD Fieldtrip engages with urban challenges in informal settlements in Cambodia by experimenting a different mode of design research. A mode that is embedded, relational, and therefore also active, reflexive and certainly collective. Embedded refers to the learning and knowledge production which is seen as a process integrally related to the practices and lived experiences of people in specific contexts. The work on the field starts from the understanding of the unique needs, abilities, aspirations, and forms of resistance of urban dwellers. Participants focus on how people shape and reshape space and how their specific forms of life shape and produce the everyday. As it is an immersion in life, the research is also necessarily relational ‐ recognising that knowledge production and learning are defined within relative positions, and in conversation with existing discourses, social and material processes. Active refers to a practice that is engaged with material conditions and social and political complexities, while reflexive acknowledges the contexts in which the research is produced and challenges hegemonic outcomes. It is precisely in the apparent contradiction between active and reflexive that an ongoing balancing act between withdrawing from taking action and engagement takes place. Withdrawing from taking action implies a humble, flexible and reflexive approach against the risk, inherent to design, to get trapped into solution‐ delivery, and prescriptive and exogenous plans. What follows is a visual account of the process to which BUDD students are exposed to and contribute to shape during and after the fieldtrip. It makes sense of the word collective, as the essential attribute of the above mentioned design research. The work developed during the fieldtrip is two times collective: in recognising that space is collectively produced by multiple subjectivities and therefore in pursuing the production of knowledge as a common endeavour. Embedded in the present text there are some students' notes developed during the fieldtrip and posted in the BUDD blog (www.tumblr.com/blog/buddesign1415) as part of the reflexive praxis of the course.
The commentary is about the Italian debate over 'peripheries' that recently gained renewed centra... more The commentary is about the Italian debate over 'peripheries' that recently gained renewed centrality in the political discourse, due to an initiative of the architect Renzo Piano, the eruption of protest and disorders in Rome between residents and migrants, and the Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's populism. One year ago the star architect Renzo Piano funded an initiative to stimulate urban regeneration and employment of young Italian designers. Although neither the projects, nor the approach are a novelty, the initiative gained great visibility and culminated last 6th December with the Italian government decision to allocate 200 million euro for the regeneration of peripheries. Beyond the many self-evident qualities, the successful initiative deserves some further speculations, especially in relation to the rhetoric of 'mending the peripheries' - a motto that suddenly became an architectural manifesto, stimulating a broader reflection on the role, the potential and the discourse of architecture and design, both in academia and outside. From our perspective, the idea to reconnect the periphery with the urban exceeds in architectural determinism and complies with a certain vision of design as thaumaturgic practice, that well fits the superhuman ego of the Italian prime Minister and its discursive practice. Rather than claim the political project of the city, the initiative, despite its good intentions, results as another attempt to reduce political instance to a mere spatial one, because it is easy to find spatial solutions. The commentary therefore seeks to look into this debate, ultimately willing to exonerate architecture from too many alleged 'failures'.
Papers by Giovanna Astolfo
The urban book series, 2024
Journal of urbanism, Mar 21, 2024
Displacement and precarity are two conditions that define our broken world. Acknowledging that an... more Displacement and precarity are two conditions that define our broken world. Acknowledging that any rhetoric of fixity, sustainability, and progress is insufficient and that the only choice is to learn to live with the fragments, the paper reflects on displacement beyond its common form of non-livability and the absence of a future. Offering some diffractions across the spatial narratives of three different territories where we worked – Iquitos in Peru, Bar Elias-Tell Serhoun in Lebanon, and Hlaingtharyar in Yangon – and mobilising the critical work of Berlant, Tsing and Agamben, this paper reframes displacement as the unfinished possibility of inhabiting, a tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtraction of future, space and possibilities, therefore contributing to the wider reflection on the challenge of inhabiting the uninhabitable urban conditions of the present.
Housing studies, Jun 30, 2024
Urban Research & Practice, Jun 23, 2023
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Journal articles by Giovanna Astolfo
broken world. Acknowledging that any rhetoric of fixity, sustainability, and progress is insufficient and that the only choice is to
learn to live with the fragments, the paper reflects on displacement
beyond its common form of non-livability and the absence of
a future. Offering some diffractions across the spatial narratives of
three different territories where we worked – Iquitos in Peru, Bar
Elias-Tell Serhoun in Lebanon, and Hlaingtharyar in Yangon – and
mobilising the critical work of Berlant, Tsing and Agamben, this
paper reframes displacement as the unfinished possibility of inhabiting, a tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtraction of
future, space and possibilities, therefore contributing to the wider
reflection on the challenge of inhabiting the uninhabitable urban
conditions of the present.
Chapters by Giovanna Astolfo
Digital resources by Giovanna Astolfo
Papers by Giovanna Astolfo
broken world. Acknowledging that any rhetoric of fixity, sustainability, and progress is insufficient and that the only choice is to
learn to live with the fragments, the paper reflects on displacement
beyond its common form of non-livability and the absence of
a future. Offering some diffractions across the spatial narratives of
three different territories where we worked – Iquitos in Peru, Bar
Elias-Tell Serhoun in Lebanon, and Hlaingtharyar in Yangon – and
mobilising the critical work of Berlant, Tsing and Agamben, this
paper reframes displacement as the unfinished possibility of inhabiting, a tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtraction of
future, space and possibilities, therefore contributing to the wider
reflection on the challenge of inhabiting the uninhabitable urban
conditions of the present.
las características ambientales, sociales, culturales e históricas que hacen tan particular al territorio amazónico peruano.
Diversas miradas como el urbanismo, la arquitectura, la ingeniería ambiental, la geografía, la antropología, la economía y la sociología, convergen en esta publicación para brindar un análisis holístico y multidimensional de esta situación, ofreciendo valiosas recomendaciones hacia la mejora de los procesos de reasentamiento poblacional —sobre todo aquellos que suceden en la Amazonía— y promoviendo la generación de ciudades amazónicas resilientes al clima.
This publication is the result of eighteen months of continuous work in Iquitos, the capital of the Loreto region of Peru and the most important city in the Peruvian Amazonia. In this city, the population resettlement process was analysed within one of its most emblematic neighbourhoods: Zona Baja de Belén. This process was developed by the Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation of Peru. The results of an analysis of resettlement processes due to the effects of climate change in a global level are presented here, in order to later introduce the environmental, social, cultural and historical characteristics that make the Peruvian
Amazonian territory so particular.
Different perspectives –from urbanism, architecture, environmental engineering, geography, anthropology, economics and sociology– converge in this publication in order to provide a holistic and multidimensional analysis of this situation. Building on these, recommendations for the improvement of population resettlement processes are outlined –especially for those that take place in the Amazonia– and promote the generation of Amazonian cities that are resilient to climate change.