Talk

Architecture and power: conversations around people and place

Tuesday 30 June 2020 4 - 6.30pm

Online Zoom talk

architecture programme

Free, booking required.

In partnership with

This year’s LFA digital symposium, in partnership with Royal Academy will capture, challenge, and explore the relationship between power, people and our built environment.

Please note, this event is taking place online via Zoom.

Emerging and established voices will contribute to two sessions consisting of presentations and discussion – investigating the complex power relationships involved in the production of architecture, how it impacts people's lives and how it can be used as a tool to affect change.

With presentations on issues ranging from London’s digital visibility to the notion of housing as a signifier of social standing, the first panel will examine "power of place" in both geographical and digital terms.

The second panel will attempt to understand key conversations around the "power of people", including political activism as an alternative mode of urban design practice as well as the role of community protest in relations to the Olympic Games.

This event is organised in partnership with the London Festival of Architecture.

Free, booking required.

In partnership with

Panel 1: Power of Place

Jana Culek
(Architect and urban planner, founder of Studio Fabula, PhD researcher at TU Delft)

Powers of Utopia
Examining a different strain of architectural thought – the utopian one – whose initial goal lies not it its realization but rather in its power to critically reflect on specific moments in history, this paper aims to identify utopias multi-layered relationship with power and the possibilities this relationship affords.

Peter Griffiths
(City Strategist, ING Media)

Is London’s global superbrand forever?
ING Media’s ongoing study into the world’s most talked about cities is now in its second year. London has remained top in Europe but (like Paris) has lost ground to Tokyo and NYC while COVID may further impact the city’s messaging. This data allows us to assess how cities perform as brands enabling us to better position them, their people and their places. So what does this mean for London and its architecture?

Dr Tahl Kaminer
(Reader at Cardiff University, author of The Efficacy of Architecture and Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation)

If They Live Like Us, They Will Become Like Us: Housing and the Embourgeoisement of the Working Class
Housing is a signifier of social standings, tacitly embodying ideologies of ‘proper’ ways of conducting oneself, of ‘correct’, socially-endorsed lifestyles. It is complicit with social pressures to adapt to, internalize and reproduce social norms and values. The talk will demonstrate this by studying the case of council housing in Britain.

Roland Reemaa
(Architect, founder of practice LLRRLLRR)

Weak Monument – Architectures Beyond the Plinth
Weak Monument examines architecture’s capacity to be political, by juxtaposing two antithetical notions – weakness and monumentality. The exhibition and research project explores the spectrum between the explicit representation of the monument and the implicit politics of everyday architectures: from the triumphal column to the pavement beneath it, through all that is in-between.

Chaired by Manijeh Verghese.
(director of Unscene Architecture, co-curator of the British Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale and Head of Public Programmes at the Architectural Association))

Panel 2: Power of people

*Representative from Section of Architectural Workers
(UVW-SAW is a new member-led trade union for all architectural workers across the sector)

Building worker power: unionising to reconstruct architectural work
The organisation of architectural work is regularly based on an uneven distribution of power: between workers and employers. As in other sectors, these hierarchies both maintain work, and reproduce issues of overwork, underpay, precarity and discrimination. What potential does worker-led unionising have to shift this balance of power, and transform architectural work?

Anisha Jogani
(Anisha Jogani leads the award-winning multidisciplinary Placemaking Team at Croydon Council)

The Croydon Imaginarium
Planning is often top-down, political and inaccessible to many. At Croydon we are seeking to disrupt this norm and make planning populist, through a physical and online space for exhibition, events, learning and active participation that is accessible, inclusive and part of everyday life – The Croydon Imaginarium.

Dr Kat Martindale
(Director Architecture + Urbanism Research Office, Visiting Lecturer Nottingham University, Global Studio Tutor Ryerson University)

The Battle for Bondi Beach: The Role and Power of Community Protest in Olympic Planning
For as long as there have been Olympic Games, there have been protests. Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico Olympics remains one of the most enduring images in sport. This presentation will discuss the evolution, influence and legacies of the groups that fought the Olympics.

Clare Richards + We Rise
(Architect and founder of ft'work + Brixton based non-profit community business established in 2017 with a mission to empower young people to create successful futures by connecting them to the world of work.)

Discovering empowerment — a research piece by young Brixton residents, through the medium of film.
We routinely underestimate the ability of young people to articulate their own opinions, yet it is imperative that we hear what they have to say. So what would it take, in their view, to give them greater power over their own destiny? And if they were to achieve it, what would they do with it?

Juan Usubillaga Narvaez
(Colombian architect, activist and PhD researcher at Cardiff University)

Can Political Activism (Re)Design Cities?
The paper proposes an understanding of political activism as a mode of urban design practice. A case study in Bogotá will exemplify how resistance, oppression and violence are instrumental in city-making processes at different scales, to call for designers to reframe current practices by engaging with voices rising up from below.

Chaired by Manijeh Verghese.