Resident Review #6

Barbara Penner is Professor of Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture (London) and a member of the Insurgent Domesticities research group at the Center for the Study of Social Inequality at Columbia University. With The Bathroom , a book published in 2013 by The University of Chicago Press and from which this article is taken, calls on us to inspect every nook and cranny of our domestic spaces to uncover hidden defects but also to free dormant desires and hopes. More specifically, she seeks to understand how a specific model of sanitary ware—small ceramic objects connected to urban water and sewer networks installed within a dedicated space and organized by precisely orchestrated rituals—has become established as the only valid model across a large part of the planet.

Under a bright sun, regularly swept by violent winds, a dozen large fields, washed away by the cultivation of vines since uprooted, lie between the exit of the A9 and the largest roundabout in the town: landscape of Business as usual , nothing to get excited about a priori. An Amazon warehouse in the Pale business park, in Fournès (Gard), is obvious at first glance, notes Hugo Soucaze. Moreover, the controversy that developed locally has aroused media disbelief in France and the United States. A correspondent from New York Times dispatched to the scene in October 2020 wondered what was driving an area where employment was sorely lacking to consider the establishment of the warehouse as a blight - the resulting heavy goods traffic? The pollution of the river? - questions readily reducing the residents' concerns to an environmentalist concern without political subtlety, in disregard of the prevailing precariousness.
Hugo Soucaze decides to meet the protagonists of the anti-Amazon struggle, in search of the counter-narrative and the alter-project that emerge from it. Beyond the actors' play in the controversy and the power relations he observed, the political subtleties he reveals through the study of documents and procedures related to the public inquiry in which the conflict is rooted are undoubtedly the most likely to address a fundamental issue: the construction of a new democratic narrative.

Keller Easterling is an architect and professor at Yale University in the United States. Her research focuses on infrastructure and how it supports city-building on a global scale. Originally published in 2012 in the journal Places , Keller Easterling's article was originally published under the title "Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft." She studies the development of special economic zones and their extraterritorial status. A phenomenon that Easterling expands and which has been translated here as "extragovernmentality." The whole interest of Easterling's work (which has never been translated into French) lies in its way of detailing all the complexity of the layer cake of spatial, technical and economic governance in a context of advanced globalization, based on a diversity of situated case studies. By providing us with knowledge often limited to technical data sheets and bureaucratic documents that are difficult to access, Easterling invites us to participate in the rewriting of the default "spatial software" that governs contemporary urban planning associated with liberalism - and offers us the keys to being able to hack it.

For many people, living in adversity, living in the ruins of capitalism, often begins deliberately with an admission of weakness, a pause, a silent and discreet search for the fragments of another story.
This is what Ysé Sorel proposes to us in this literary text centered on the figure of Orpheus. Ysé Sorel is familiar with the gentle radicalism that consists of beginning with dreams, of redistributing the body and the psyche in the play of experience. In a context of advanced climate change, her article explores a stimulating inversion of values ​​between high and low that carries strong political potential.

Language : French

State : nine