Portside

While critiques of the politics of space emerged primarily from adjacent disciplines – philosophy, sociology, geography – Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends (2009) stands out as a significant intervention from within the architectural discourse itself. It re-invigorated debates around architecture’s autonomy and revealed its deep entanglement with the messy realities of social life. Since then, a growing body of scholarship has interrogated the political dimensions of the built environment. This new volume, edited by Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi builds on and complicates that trajectory by bringing together diverse voices across a range of political issues to examine how architectural knowledge might confront its problematic past – a legacy of complicity with neoliberal governance, and of abetting imperial and fascist regimes of power – and move beyond it. The editors mobilise alternative spatial imaginaries and pose an urgent question that permeates the volume: if architecture is always already political, what is to be done? 

Reimagining spatial practice 

The introductory chapter by Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi situates architecture and urban space within broader socio-political concerns. From the outset, the authors assert that the discourse must face social realities such as exclusion, marginality, discrimination, and inequality. They call for modes of democratic co-existence through, for example, more inclusive participatory design processes. As they claim, architects need to “take a position against the inequalities and ethically/morally wrong practices that crises of our time have created, otherwise they lose their social relevance” (6). But this urgent call for a shift, according to the editors, must also navigate existing political frameworks and resist reductive binaries such as top-down vs. bottom-up. They frame this as an ethical imperative, and call on those with a stake in the production of space to act.

Following Gilles Deleuze’s notion of using theory as a ‘box of tools,’ the handbook provides conceptual tools for alternative spatial practices – ones that may catalyse a “slow” revolution from within the discipline

The volume does more than simply consolidate theoretical positions; rather, it invites intervention and rethinking of spatial praxis. In this sense, it can be influential for all those engaged in spatial practice today. It is especially useful for younger generations who must navigate an increasingly complex field of socio-political challenges. Following Gilles Deleuze’s notion of using theory as a “box of tools,” the handbook provides conceptual tools for alternative spatial practices – ones that may catalyse a “slow” revolution from within the discipline, as the editors suggest.  

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (2013, originally published 1969), the book’s discursive format – spanning 36 chapters – is not a static repository, but a stratified field of statements. These contributions reflect the current pulse of political and ecological challenges confronting architecture. As Foucault reminds us, discursive formations do “not accumulate endlessly” (145); statements are governed by historical rules determining what can be said, by whom, and under what conditions. 

The volume’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration […] calls for alliances between urban researchers, artists, engineers, lawyers, and activists to challenge the paradigms of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene

Structured across five sections – Events and Dissidence; Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire; Climate and Ecology; Urban Commons and Social Participation; and Marginalities and Postcolonialism – the volume offers a navigational framework for the reader. Each section opens with an introductory essay that helps chart the themes, drawing transversal links across the book. The case studies – skateparks, hospitals, rural communities, urban squares, digital environments, abandoned buildings – show how a spatial praxis can inform acts of resistance. In this light, the handbook is not a unified narrative but a differential collective murmur of interventions – whether ground-level or speculative – that reveal the potentialities of a critical architecture. 

Collective resistance and colonial spatial violence

The volume’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration is evident throughout, beginning in the introduction, which calls for alliances between urban researchers, artists, engineers, lawyers, and activists to challenge the paradigms of the Anthropocene-Capitalocene. This political plurality resonates with global movements such as Black Lives Matter and Indigenous land right struggles. The chapters examine how such critical concepts are enacted spatially. For example, the chapter, “Spatializing Queer Ecologies” by C. Greig Crysler et al., explores queer ambivalence through a prehistory of queer ecological spaces that challenge binary, patriarchal ideas of nature and the greenwashing they often support. One such place is Druid Heights in Marin County, California, a proto-queer anarchist community, which embraces non-binary sexualities and multi-species cohabitation, while critiquing settler colonial legacies. Their models of communal living, non-exclusive partnerships, and ambivalent land ownership offer alternatives for inhabiting space in the face of planetary collapse. 

From rural California to the dense urban Hong Kong, the chapter, ”Commoning Technicities in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement”  by Gerhard Bruyns and Stavros Kousoulas explores collective politics during the 2014 protests through the lens of affect theory. What they term “guerrilla urbanism” emerges from mobilisation: slogans on roads, encampments, makeshift structures, and barricades – where built infrastructure and human agency are mediated through technicity. According to the authors, “technicity deals with how humans relate and transform their environment through technology and how these relations transform all of them” in their own ways – “humans, technology and environment” (70). Drawing on Brian Massumi’s writing on affect, they show how the Umbrella Movement produced a collective defamiliarisation of urban space, resisting privatisation and enabling an emergent commons.

Another important chapter is Nishat Awan’s “Atlas Otherwise”, which seeks to dislocate colonial mapping, challenging dominant Western representational models that are now replicated through digital technologies. One example concerns Palestine, where satellite imaging is limited by US military-imposed restrictions. As a result, Palestinian territories remain selectively visible, reinforcing asymmetries of sovereign control. Awan traces thick, material moments that resist the clarity of colonial visuality, calling attention to what colonial mapping conceals or excludes. For the author, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha’s work on Mumbai, particularly through the project Soak (2009), offers an alternative cartographic imagination. Mathur and da Cunha reconceive terrain through their collaged sectional drawings – a shifting “monsoon surface” – “drawn” by weather and local practices like terracing and bunding. Their representations challenge colonial mappings that misrepresent Mumbai as a static territory. 

The volume’s ambition is to explore how architecture might reconfigure social relations and contest the spatial logic of capitalism

In Murray Fraser’s “Introduction to Marginalities and Postcolonialism” – Part VI of the book – the author mentions a pressing issue of political space today: Gaza. Gaza exemplifies contemporary colonial spatial violence. Through policies of displacement, and – what Sari Hanafi calls “spacio-cide” (2009) – Israel turns territory into a weapon of domination. In 2023 alone, over half of Gaza’s buildings were destroyed, with homes, schools, and hospitals targeted. This is part of a broader settler-colonial logic, where land becomes a mechanism for marginalisation, dispossession, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian life. The handbook also shows why such political matters are of concern for architecture. Since Fraser’s introductory chapter was written, the situation in Gaza has worsened into a humanitarian catastrophe. In this context, what agency can architecture still claim in the world? 

The future of architecture 

Together, these examples underscore the volume’s ambition – to explore how architecture might reconfigure social relations and contest the spatial logic of capitalism. The concluding chapter, “Robots, AI and Spatial Politics – Unpacking Potentials”, by Dagmar Reinhardt, extends the volume’s scope into the politics of emerging technologies. It highlights how AI and robotics are embedded in new systems of algorithmic regulation, labour automation, and surveillance. However, given the significance of these issues, the chapter also reveals the need for a more extensive treatment of digital architectures, algorithmic governance, and digital economy to warrant its own section. Despite this, the volume effectively positions architecture as having an important political role that practitioners and researchers must address. For interdisciplinary architectural teaching, as well as research, this handbook is a timely and active resource that carries with it an activist urgency. It invites readers to act and to design more inclusive architectures that are situated and respond to our socio-political lives, reclaiming the built environment as a space of ethical engagement. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

George Themistokleous’ critical spatial research investigates the role of the body within media assemblages in contested territories. He is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Body Matters (Routledge, 2027), and author of Towards a Cybernographic Architecture: Digital Power and the Politics of Subjectivization (Routledge, 2028). He currently teaches at Norwich University of the Arts and is founder of Para-sight (www.para-sight.net).