In Search of a Theory for Critical Urban Practice

Roundtable discussion, Delft School of Design

Place: BG.Oost.410

Time: 15-06-2010, 11.00

Participants include: Margaret Crawford (University of California, Berkeley), Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester), Jeremy Till (University of Westminster), Pieter Uyttenhove (Universiteit Gent).

Practice-based professions such as architecture and urbanism struggle since long to come to terms with their trans-disciplinary character (in the sense of being both discipline and profession), in particular when it comes to processing and shaping a critical engagement with the world. For long, and not the least within the Critical Theory tradition, critique has been processed primarily in inter-disciplinary terms, namely through an architecture theory that is informed by social, political, and cultural theories. Such  critique deploys a distance from practice in order to enable the discerning of large scale processes without the danger of becoming ‘operative criticism’ – the term Tafuri used to describe criticism which legitimates practices – provides a much needed understanding of the world, but falls short of addressing the means for architectural practice to gain critical agency. Along such suggestions for a different, critical though also more practice-oriented theory, important questions have emerged, such as: How can a practice-oriented theory remain critical and avoid becoming the subterfuge for practice? Can theory and practice develop a dialectical relation, with each adjusting to the demands posed by the other? In particular in the current neoliberal or so-called post-political context, wherein the urban is often engaged in terms of glocal remedies for the city, there is a clear need for the establishment of more appropriate theory-practice relations. Despite the pertinence and wide dissemination of the critiques formulated by urban geographers like David Harvey, architecture and urbanism, as practices, require more than critiques of neoliberal urban policies, if they ever want to act effectively within or against that condition. This search for an operative though critical, practice-engaging theory, and the challenge to gravitate from critique to practice, a move which is less simple than imagined, forms the subject of the Urban Asymmetries studio and of this roundtable discussion.