Transitory Space

The tropical urbanism of coastal East Africa has a thousand-year-long history, making it a recognized example of sustainable urbanism. Although economically dependent on trade, the precolonial Islamic towns of the so-called Swahili coast did not feature markets or other public buildings dedicated to mercantile activities before the European colonial involvement. In this regard, Swahili urban tradition differed from other tropical Islamic cities, such as in Morocco, Mali, Egypt or the Middle East, where markets fulfilled the role of social and economic hubs and, in terms of movement, major transitory/meeting spaces in the trading towns. Yet, the Swahili urban tradition thrived for centuries as a well-connected cosmopolitan type of tropical urbanism. As research has suggested, the public role of spaces associated with trade might have been fulfilled by houses. Using approaches of space syntax and network analysis, this article studies the morphology of the houses considering whether it could have been the courtyards that simulated the role of markets thanks to their transitory spatial configuration. The results are discussed reflecting on other models of houses with courtyards, especially the modern Swahili house appearing later in the colonial era when markets began to be established, and Islamic houses known from elsewhere.

This paper explores the worldwide unprecedented bunker infrastructure of Switzerland. Since the 1960s, the country has built hundreds of thousands of nuclear bomb shelters in family homes. Drawing on poststructural theories of social practice and ritual theory, the all-pervasive structures in the private sphere are analyzed as transitory spaces that coordinate the movement and connections between different milieus, regimes, and bodies. By studying the operational scripts of the authorities and the spatial arrangements and artifacts of the shelter, the paper argues that a sequenced set of “rites of passage” were to be practiced in order to guarantee a transition into the postapocalypse without any violations of norms, social roles, and affective regimes. However, this “territorializing” process launched by the state with the aim of engineering a “bomb-proof” society met with little success. By ignoring, distorting, or violating the constant prewar situation in their homes, Swiss people, as early as in the 1970s, started to undermine the shelter as an instance of concrete governmentality. Being traversed by various processes of “deterritorialization” the bunker lost its function as a locus of secured passage and transformed into a highly dynamic “empty space” that hides, till this day, residua for creativity and difference.

Questioned about its welcoming policy which is dramatically showing the weakness of a community project reluctant to include the other than itself, Europe is called upon to reconsider its identity to fulfill the idea of plurality on which it was founded. Barriers of barbed wire, of police task forces, of control and containment devices, are erected as walls against the epochal migration flow. These boundaries are constantly pulled down by the impetus of poverty and war pressure. Barriers deny the dynamism of a territory whose geography has been reshaped several times, even in recent history, by its shifting borders; furthermore, they refuse the mobility of populations in a globalized world which movement is the nature of time. Barriers overshadow the raison d’etre of the continent that has been derived its “multiple unity” from cultural contamination generated by crossings. By denying what fundamentally features its identity and its present time, Europe is in danger of closing in on itself, seeing itself as a fortress, instead of thinking itself as a project of habitability whose conditions have been the premise and purpose of its formation. The article contributes to constructing an image and a project of the European territories beyond the boundaries of geographical and cultural identity, tied to a representation of itself excluding what has not already been included. It offers an explorative path aimed at opening a dialogue with the immigrants, from the planner and territorial researcher’s point of view, who might become a truly active and creative voice in giving shape and thought to our present time.