A curatorial approach towards deliberative cultures of assembly and a realistic scenario of decentralized power and decision-making. Miessen's ongoing research trajectory Cultures of Assembly was initially kicked off during a Harvard Graduate School of Design fellowship together with Joseph Grima, in which the two architects investigated the socio-political dimension of (urban) spatial design by looking at the Kuwaiti cultural and social landscape with a specific interest in the politico-spatial local phenomenon of a distributed urban form of para-institutional assembly known as Diwaniyah. Diwaniyah can be understood and interpreted in multiple ways. Beyond a techno-futuristic idea of progress, it presents a showcase of an alternative that attempts to imagine a model of a (more) solidaric city. On the scale of a city, and in fact small country, it interrogates how we-as a society-can learn and produce other formats to talk to each other, working towards realistic scenarios of decentralised power and decision-making structures and spatial justice. The book asks- how can spaces-both physical and virtually-be envisaged to create publics? How can we, today, offer and propose methods as to how to engage physical social interactions, publics, and civic life from the point of view of individual participation through novel and critical formats of collective discursive spaces? How is collectivity and society being generated spatially and in terms of critical policy? How do we "practice" society as a bodily, physical form, and how does this practice contribute to spatial justice? What kind of spaces can exacerbate these practices? What kind of spatial design-in terms of reflecting Mouffian agonistic realities-can we imagine as platforms for change? How can we, as architects, designers, and spatial practitioners devise methods and tools that make sure that formal and informal processes of politics, institution building, and societal becoming do not lose out on the physical, spatial, and bodily dimension? Central to this project is the reflecting on and rendering of the underlying driving forces of informal institution building at the interface of deliberative (urban) spatial politics-in a general political climate of Fisherian capitalist realism in conjunction with the social-ecological transition while, arguably, facing a crisis of imagination. This project articulates the curatorial potential for urban policy making, mediating between the city, state politics, and society at large. It triggers a series of potential interpretations as to what constitutes the physical parameters of a discourse in space. If we understand assembly as a form of gathering, and the fire as the starting point for gathering to occur, then Diwaniyah presents us with the concept of the fire. This is a starting point only. But a relevant one.

Agonistic Assemblies: On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality

Politics & Social Sciences

Miessen, Markus

Social Sciences

Sternberg Press

Welcome to Harmonistan! Over the last decade, the term “participation” has become increasingly overused. When everyone has been turned into a participant, the often uncritical, innocent, and romantic use of the term has become frightening. Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility. Similar to the notion of an independent politician dissociated from a specific party, this third part of Miessen's “Participation” trilogy encourages the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change.
Miessen argues for an urgent inversion of participation, a model beyond modes of consensus. Instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of political struggle, Miessen candidly reflects on the limits and traps of its real motivations. Rather than breading the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, he argues for conflict as an enabling, instead of disabling, force. The book calls for a format of conflictual participation―no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs. 
Markus Miessen (*1978) is an architect, consultant, and writer based in Berlin. He runs the collaborative agency for spatial practice Studio Miessen and is director of the Winter School Middle East (Kuwait). Miessen has taught at institutions such as the Architectural Association (London), Columbia, and MIT. He is currently a Professor for Architecture and Curatorial Practice at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany, a Harvard Fellow, and completing his PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths, London). www.studiomiessen.com

The Nightmare of Participation

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Sternber Pr

Following the publication of architect/theorist Markus Miessen s hugely successful The Nightmare of Participation, on the politics of participatory practices in architecture, spatial practices and art, and the initiation of the popular pocket series Critical Spatial Practice, comes his timely new book engaging the ethics and politics of practice, Crossbenching. Following over a decade of theoretical research, the small softcover publication focuses on Miessen s own architecture 'platform,' Studio Miessen, in which he reapproaches the question of authorship in the context of a studio practice. Proposing a more discursive approach, he acknowledges the need for 'an independent actor with a conscience' to navigate the conflicts, negotiation and maneuvers among the multiplicity of agents, both human (architects, clients, financiers and builders) and nonhuman (silicon, plastic, concrete and so on), that is architecture. Instead of using project-teams or working within the typical structure of an architecture office, however, Miessen assembled working groups incorporating 'outsiders' on the theory that architecture and space-making is a collective set of interrelations crystalizing a form of civitas. Using the analogy of the crossbencher the independent politician in the uber-conservative British House of Lords he proposes a reframing of architecture practice as one which operates on the basis of alternative and self-governing political parameters, hoping to open up a fresh debate on ways of acting politically. Preface by Austrian philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian, introduction by Swiss journalist and author Hannes Grassegger and Miessen, and postscript by Canadian artist, writer and designer Patricia Reed. Miessen is currently Distinguished Professor in Practice at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Crossbenching: Toward Participation As Critical Spatial Practice (Sternberg Press)

Architecture

As Dubai builds unprecedented realms of new luxury, other parts of the Middle East grapple with physical and symbolic histories. Relics come up against reinvention and revolution. And micromutations in Middle Eastern politics and economics have become part of our shared "local" news around the globe. Brought to us by the publishers of Bidoun, the critically acclaimed quarterly, With/Without is an anthology that casts an eye across broad swathes of the Middle East today. Featuring an intriguing mock-archival design, this equally text- and image-heavy publication is divided into 14 chapters, each of which takes on an architectural or institutional typology--the museum, the villa, the street, the skyscraper, etc.--and illustrates it with essays, interviews and documentary photographs. Featuring more than 30 contributions from writers, artists, designers and architects including Rem Koolhaas, Armin Linke and Keller Easterling, it takes on subjects as diverse as the redevelopment of Martyr's Square in Beirut, gated communities in Istanbul, Dubai's mall culture, bridge building in Mecca and the creation of a new Iraqi flag in the post-Saddam era. The underlying question in all of these inquiries is: How do spaces and territories form fundamental ideas about individuals, communities, and worlds?

With/Without: Spatial Products, Practices and Politics in the Middle East

Basar, Shumon

Carver, Antonia

Bidoun Books

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