Open Access Books - Architecture - 2019
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PublicationSettling for Less: The Planned Resettlement of Israel's Negev Bedouin( 2019)The resettlement of the Negev Bedouin (Israel) has been wrought with controversy since its inception in the 1960s. Presenting evidence from a two-decade period, the author addresses how the changes that took place over the past sixty to seventy years have served the needs and interests of the State rather than those of Bedouin community at large. While town living fostered improvements in social and economic development, numerous unintended consequences jeopardized the success of this planning initiative. As a result, the Bedouin community endured excessive hardship and rapid change, abandoning its nomadic lifestyle and traditions in response to the economic, political, and social pressure from the State-and received very little in return.
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PublicationNew Islamic Urbanism: The Architecture of Public and Private Space in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia( 2019)Since the dawn of the oil era, cities in Saudi Arabia have witnessed rapid growth and profound societal changes. As a response to foreign architectural solutions and the increasing popularity of Western lifestyles, a distinct style of architecture and urban planning has emerged. Characterised by an emphasis on privacy, expressed through high enclosures, gates, blinds, and tinted windows, 'New Islamic Urbanism' constitutes for some an important element of piety. For others, it enables alternative ways of life, indulgence in banned social practices, and the formation of both publics and counterpublics. Tracing the emergence of 'New Islamic Urbanism', this book sheds light on the changing conceptions of public and private space, in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in the Saudi city of Jeddah. It challenges the widespread assumption that the public sphere is exclusively male in Muslim contexts such as Saudi Arabia, where women's public visibility is limited by the veil and strict rules of gender segregation. Showing that the rigid segregation regime for which the country is known serves to constrain the movements of men and women alike, Stefan Maneval provides a nuanced account of the negotiation of public and private spaces in Saudi Arabia.
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PublicationLiquid Life: On Non-Linear Materiality( 2019)If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive." Liquid Life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, Armstrong conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system. Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration, including contributor Rolf Hughes’ "angelology" of language, which explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina’s graphical notations that help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, liquid life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away.
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PublicationFinding Room in Beirut: Places of the Everyday( 2019)Finding Room in Beirut: Places of the Everyday demonstrates why it is worth our while to explore the value and contemporary meaning of urban areas about to undergo complete renewal. Branching off from discourses surrounding the terrain vague, the book argues that large populated urban areas meet the criteria of the vague and constitute a particular perspective from which to build a critical stance in regards to the contemporary city. But unlike a terrain vague, a vague urbain — inhabited areas where property ownership is usually obscure and informal behaviours a daily affair — possesses real communities and offers an alternative understanding on how a city can be practiced and how lessons should be learned before its complete transformation. Stemming from a photographic and architectural documentation of Bachoura, a central area of Beirut, Lebanon, the book shows how the vague urbain allows for different ways of inhabiting, ways that are as — or perhaps even more — real and anchored in the imagination of the city as those proposed by standardising developments. Building on the intricacies of found situations, improvised uses and local narratives, it is an exploration as to how the meeting of a marvellous realism with l’intrigue, the vague urbain, and temporary architecture can provide opportunities for the emergence of hidden narratives.