Welcome!

Designing Economic Cultures is a research project that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.

The fundamental question the project poses is:
how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent economic system, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?  Read more ›

Construction site for non-affirmative practice

Constructive Dismantling

My Castle Is Your Castle

The relation to public space in Poland – seminar with Piotr Juskowiak and Jakub Szczesny

During this seminar we investigated peoples’ relation to public space in Poland. Together with our invited guests Piotr Juskowiak (human geographer) and Jakub Szczesny (architect) on one hand we explored the theoretical framework that surrounds many of the issues related to public space and on the other hand we learned about a number of projects initiated by architect Jakub Szczesny that suggest different ways of engagement with public space.

THINGS THAT CAME UP DURING THE SEMINAR

– “How we define public space is intimately connected with ideas what it means to be human, the nature of society, and the kind of political community we want to be.” (Deutsche 1996: 269)
– towards new spatial ontologies – heterotopia (Foucault), third space (Bhabha, Soja), space of flows (Castells), exopolis (Soja), post-polis (Rewers), camp (Agamben), common space (Hardt, Negri);
– public as accessible and open, opposed to private as closed (C. Mouffe 2005);
– drawing on the writings of Chantal Mouffe, critical artistic practices should unveil all that is repressed by the dominant consensus and institute public space (”space of common action among people”);
– reclaiming common space. Matteo Pasquinelli proposes the practice of creative sabotage – understood as disarmament of gentrification dispositifs through alternative uses of urban space;

Links:
Gentrification, Art and Creative Sabotage in Poznan and Warsaw a paper by Piotr Juskowiak.
Centrala – designer’s task force, the collective that Jakub Szczesny is part of.

Readings:
– Commonwealth by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009)
– The Political Economy of Public Space by David Harvey (2006)
– Which Public Space for Artistic Practices? by Chantal Mouffe (2005)