Enacted utopias: Learning from insurgent spatial practices

Abstract

This chapter argues that engagement with insurgent spatial practices opens avenues for politically progressive architectural thinking that is better capable of recognising context specific sustainability with the potential to address the climate emergency. It offers one perspective on sustainable spatial production and draws on Lefebvre’s concepts of abstract and differential space, depicting dominant forms of spatial production and delving into practices that challenge them. The concept of insurgent spatial practices is built on, by which we mean the forms of spatial production that occur outside of profit-driven urbanisation and official urban development. Through multiple cases, we demonstrate concrete ways how architectural thinking is situated and experiential knowledge is produced and mobilised for sustainability.