Ground Works: The un/built Land

Innocent Parks, Strategic Infrastructures and Speculative Wastelands

Agency for Better Living

No architecture without land. Land is a necessary prerequisite for all architecture, it is the literal ground that all architecture builds upon, the raw material of the city and a factor of production for urban society. While architecture has always been considered a means of placemaking and while there has been a growing awareness of the downsides of the expansive sealing of the soil, land itself has remained without much attention.

The role, land takes on in an urban context become most apparent where there seems to be nothing: in the ostensible emptiness of open space, of unbuilt or undeveloped land. This nothing of the void – be it a designed parkscape, a courtyard or mere wastelands – can only be reflected in the face of the something of its surrounding: in the dualism of built and unbuilt, of order and wilderness, in which land appears as a place of conflictual relation and of struggle. The practice of enclosure for the sake of profit and to prevent others from using it for free has marked land as contested, as a place of struggle since the early days of capitalism: in the so-called primitive accumulation, in exploitation, but also in counterhegemonic strategies of reappropriation.

In a closer look the beauty of these natures unravels: sometimes, apparently innocent parks turn out as products of coloniality, untouched nature happens to be a result from extractive capitalism and wild greenery is revealed as a practice of capital speculation – or as a purposeful strategy against exploitation. Ground Works investigates these dualities between the built and the unbuilt, between what is termed Nature and Society and reflects the question of land, of ground and soil in dominant architecture and urban culture in today’s multiple crises. The studio addresses the role of land through a rereading of the concept of the park and its ecologies, in which the park – for the lack of a better word – describes all accessible open land, that is not occupied by built mass. The task will be to rethink the park in an open architecture that is capable to house contemporary urban life. The studio pays particular attention to possible decommodified forms of use and tenure of land, to practices of commoning and to alternative forms of making architecture.

Our methodology encompasses research and artistic practices: it involves detailed analysis of the un/built environment through mapping and modelling, readings in the political economy of land rent and research on protests and models to counter land as a means for profit-making. This analysis will provide the material for drawing architectural scenarios to re-read these spaces and to prepare them for new forms of living and being: An architecture of radical speculation that allows for an archaeology of possible futures to fathom today’s necessary course of action. Unlike in the speculation on land, speculation here means nothing less but a tool for envisioning possible futures to understand the present: to negotiate what will, what shall and what shall not come.