The Fens: Protocols of Care for a Decaying Landscape, Amy Glover, DIP7 2020-2021.

Fluid Territories
On Rights and Spaces

Hamed Khosravi, Platon Issaias

Diploma Unit 7
Architectural Association School of Architecture
2021-22
From the invention of perspective to satellite imagery, various techniques of
measurements and surveying the land have reduced the three-dimensional
ecological, cultural, and social spaces of human and non-human existence to
mere economic parameters. Their physical and non-physical matter has been
converted to multiple types of ‘assets’, entering the realm of calculability,
that are solely based on the ideas of productivity and exclusivity. Historically
this has led to the emergence of various forms of social and spatial segrega-
tions, classifications, and conflicts, subsequently mediated through protocols,
resolutions, and contracts and of course what we know today as ‘property’.
Such processes of possession/dispossession and subjectification have ma-
nipulated and mediated forms of association, among individuals, communi-
ties and collectives, between forces, space and subjects, and between human
and non-human agents.

In his A Discourse on Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau makes it clear that

“the cultivation of the earth necessarily brought about its distribution; and
property, once recognised, gave rise to the first rules of justice; […] a new
kind of right: that is to say, the right of property, which is different from the
right deducible from the law of nature.”1 Hence, in western modernity the
‘man-made’ law (ius positum) was introduced in the most violent way. From
racialised and gendered forms of slave labour to contemporary forms of
coloniality, dispossession, and resource extraction, all are integral elements
of this existential and planetary violence. In fact, the ‘defined’ space is a re-
sult of complex power relations: starting with parcellation of land, assigning
an individual or a group a share and regulating the communication between
shares. These rights are nothing but distributed equally. The spatial protago-
nist of this historical process are walls and enclosures, enforced by laws; of
property, of trade rights and maritime space, of monopolies, of human, so-
cial, and individual rights, of multiple physical, bodily and mental exclusions.

In DIP7 we investigate architectural propositions that react to such territo-

rial conditions; frames that capture, forces that trigger, lines that appropriate
and lenses that make visible the conflicts between space, the territory and its
subjects

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality (London: Penguin, 1984), 28.

Left: A Conversation between Traces, Maroussia Tasiaux, DIP7 2020-21.

(New) Colonial Infrastructures

The prehistory of the contemporary financial market is often a subject of

dispute; however, many scholars have traced its origins back to the sixteenth
century and the age of ‘Sea Empires’. Dutch, Belgian, British, French, and
Nordic States conquered and settled more than half of the globe through
a process of colonisation, within which trade and transportation were the
key devices. Their infrastructure and settlements did, of course, go beyond
mere economic deals and trades; they have recurrently played a strategic role
in global history in various militaristic, economic, and social guises, whose
effects are still present today. It was, in fact, the inherent order of the mari-
time space– and the concept of ‘free sea’– that served the colonisation of
the ‘new territories’. It could be claimed that maritime space, and its spatio-
juridical orders, altered how a land was occupied, settlement were built, and
its inhabitants enslaved, dehumanised, and subjected to new rules and insti-
tution of power. Therefore, any forms of exploitation, violence, and slavery
were justified through a non-existent association with the law of ‘mainland’
through the titles of the colonisers.

As the German jurist Carl Schmitt explains in his book The Nomos of the Earth,
the notion of ‘free sea’ or the axiom ‘freedom of the sea’ meant something
very simple, that the sea was a zone free for booty. […] On the open sea,
there were no limits, no boundaries, no consecrated sites, no sacred orienta-
tions, no law, and no property.2 Anything ‘found’ was to become the property
of the finders. It included people, goods, lands, as well as labour, cultures,
and beliefs. Such forms of colonisation have been mainly shaped through
private trading companies– famously known as the British, the Dutch, and
the Danish East-India and West-India Companies. Although they were pri-
vate corporations, they were granted very peculiar jurisdictional powers: hav-
ing the right to wage war, imprison and execute,, negotiate treaties, cultivate
lands, and build settlements. Indeed, those companies were mega freelance
agents—not only to expand the maritime trade overseas but also to operate
as an accepted part of naval warfare, taking part in expanding the empires.
Ports, warehouses, plantation units, camps, and new towns are spatial arse-
nals of such colonial forces. Many of which still carry the original traces of
social and spatial inequalities. The infrastructure of the East and West-India
Companies materialised class, race and gender segregation and exclusion in
a planetary scale.

2. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth (New York: Telos Publishing, 2006 [1950]), 43.

Left: The Stor(age)y of Things. Domestic landscape of objects, Nour Hamade, DIP7 2019-2020.
Left: A busy stacking room in the opium factory at Patna, India. Lithograph after W. S. Sherwill, c.
1850. Wellcome Collection.
Slave workers stacking opium balls in the warehouse operated by the British East India Company in
Patna, Bengal before shipping to China.

In 1799, China’s emperor, Kia King, bans opium production and poppy farming illegal. The British
East India Company sees this event as an economic opportunity and establishes vast poppy cultiva-
tion plants in India, in the fertile of Patna, a town in Bihar, 600 kilometres up the Ganges River from
Calcutta. In half a century Patna turned into a global logistic centre for production and distribution
of opium, whose main targeted market was China. Large territories of fertile land were occupied by
the East India Company, and consequently many local farmers were dispossessed and were forced to
work on their ‘own’ lands but as workers of the Company. Young workers and women were enslaved
in warehouses, and lived under severe conditions. The East India Company’s monopoly on produc-
tion and trade of opium, was not only founded on high exploitation of Indian workers and disposses-
sion of their rights, but ultimately led to decades of war with China, famously known as Opium Wars.
It is the birth of the modern, imperial state that intensified archetypal enclo-
sures, from the body to the planet as a whole. It’s the moment capitalist glob-
al trade was born, when a series of ‘non-city’, territorial ‘externalities’, wild
landscapes and bodies have to be smashed and tamed; they had to become
productive. If the enclosures of the commons was the act that produced the
model wage labourer and the ‘urban’-’rural’ dichotomy and uneven develop-
ment in the colonial centre, as Marx would argued, it’s slave trade and the
racist, gendered productive device of the American plantation, as Jason W.
Moore have underlined, that the perfected exploitation of resources and ter-
ritories in a global scale, which also marks the beginning of Earth’s ecological
catastrophe, unevenly distributed yet again.3

Those spaces are not so different from today’s transportation hubs, logistic
infrastructure and distribution centres; they create an ‘state of exception’,
justified by security measures, international economic agreements, risk fac-
tors that ultimately grants the corporations, companies, and organisations
a privileged access to, if not possession of others’ rights, data, labour, and
properties. Such asymmetrical power relations are not only expressed and
materialised in space and architecture but are somehow produced by them.

How can these spaces and rights be reclaimed?

How can architectural projects interrupt these vicious cycles of exploitation and exclusion?
What is the role of architectural research and design, in academia and in practice, within
the current struggles about race, gender, and social equality?

How can architecture, and its archetypical elements – form, type, object, and material –
respond to the current social, ecological, and spatial crises?

Finally, what are the limits and ambitions of design practices in intervening within social
spaces of disputes?

3. James W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).

Left: From Mud to Dust, Janos Bergob-Sowicz., DIP7 2019-20.

Hyper Rural Productions

Since the birth of the modern nation state and the rise of imperialist colo-
nial powers, the countryside has been treated as an outdated and pre-capi-
talist, pre-modern ruin, within which the polarised and polarising ‘centre’–
‘periphery’ schema has been intensifying the already asymmetrical power
relations and never-ending exploitation of rural and indigenous populations.
‘Rural’ is commonly defined in opposition to the ‘urban’; rural as a space
of production (agriculture, fishing, forestry, etc.) and urban as a congested
space of consumption, infrastructure and dense habitation. The opposition
of the two words somehow imply distinct degrees of human development:
‘civilised and non-civilised’, ‘modern’, ‘outdated’, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’
versus ‘conservative’, ‘backward-looking’ and ‘reactionary’. The etymological
roots of the term ‘rural’, however, unfolds its inherent characteristics more
precisely. Derived from the Latin ruralis, it connotes the idea of an ‘open
land’, ‘country’, or in general ‘open space’. Interestingly, it shares its root with
the word ‘room’, both conveying the idea of ‘openness’. While the original
‘natural’ environments have been often categorised as ‘unknown’ or even
‘non-human’, the ‘open land’ suggests a different condition; it has not only
been associated with natural qualities, and a ‘primitive state’ of a landscape,
rather it suggests a possibility of occupation and exploitation.

Such division, so clear and distinct historically, has lost its implication in the
contemporary distinction and meaning of the urban–rural dichotomy. Filled
with layers of high-tech infrastructure, covered with carpets of industrial
plants, glass houses and distribution centres, what formerly known as ‘ru-
ral’, ‘country’ or ‘countryside’ has tuned into the most ‘urbanised’ landscape.
Of course, such condition cannot be considered as a global phenomenon,
neither was ‘urbanisation’ behind its rise. This ambiguity is also present in
the way in which architecture and urbanism, as both distinct disciplines and
forms of knowledge, respond to such conceptual dichotomy. The word ‘de-
sign’ — as the mantra of these professions — is rarely used when it is to
address the rural, while ‘planning’ is the key mode of intervention that is
applicable to both rural and urban. It somehow explains why historically the
‘open space’ or the ‘rural’ has been the locus of managerial organisations and
control whose purpose has been to measure, predict and act upon in order to
minimise the risks, and to secure economic ‘progress’.

Left: The Inaccessible Land, Malene Riise, DIP7 2020-2021.

Left: Protocol for a Floor: Between Commons and Working Beach, Buster Rönngren, DIP7 2018-19.

The shingle beaches that stretch along the South-Eastern UK coastline are contested territories. It is
where two property interests of use and enjoyment within a same landform meet. The 2006 Com-
mons Act, which sets out the provision for the designation of Village Greens, falls short in the case
of registering shingle beaches; an example of this is when rights stand against coastal defence duties
or forms of labour. The legislation, applying to both green space and coastal areas, says that changes
are allowed only if they result in “the better enjoyment” of the designated area. In Protocol for a
Floor: Between Commons and Working Beach, Buster Rönngren registered these silent conflicts
through the technique of night photography. The project proposed a communal infrastructures that
would facilitate various activities that are seen to enable access to the beach by means of occupation.
Production lies at the core of this paradigm; it becomes the key representa-
tion of the space, flattening not only the natural features and geographical
specificities, but also forms of labour, modes of living, familial relations,
kinship as well as socio-political struggles; wherein various spatial configu-
rations are seen as crystallised asymmetric power relations; where different
devices, technologies and machines of design and planning are defined by
economic measures and (geo)political affairs. They dismiss communal forms
of living and collective use of land.

How can we think of new social, legal, topological, topographical and spatial/architectural
typologies that could firstly resist dominating managerial apparatuses, and secondly could
generate a possibility of commoning?

Left: The Distant: Unsettled Land of Britain, Georgia Hablützel, DIP7 2019-2020.
Walls of Association

Excessive privatisation of land in urban areas together with fast-growing real

estate market has created an accelerating mechanism of exclusion and con-
trol. The key spatial features of this historical process is again ‘enclosures’
and ‘walls’. Compartmentalisation of space and partitioning of land, plot,
and even domestic space, is the direct result of such forms of appropriation.
This process inevitably implies a power relation that not only conditions
the space but also its inhabitants and subjects. Deleuze and Guattari in their
book A Thousand Plateaus (1980) remind that “the state operates through the
capture of movements and the partitioning of space.” It is not only the ‘right
to roam’ or free access to the commons that are limited, it affect all aspects
of life most including domestic sphere, forms of care, and affective provi-
sions. Hence, any attempts towards commoning are no more limited to col-
lectivisation and socialisation,, but require practices that reinvent spaces and
the rights of use, beyond property and against dispossession; from the room,
to the land, and the sea, in a planetary scale.

The unit dwells in the juridical ambiguity associated with such contested
spaces and its correlated geographies– from ‘non-city’ forms of habitation
to highly urban conditions. We claim that these geographies should be seen
as politicized territorial entities through which broader political, environ-
mental, economic and societal questions could be addressed. In this way any
spatial proposition, whether landscape, urban or architectural, are challenged
and revisited through the lens of this territorial network. The research-by-
design projects would investigate multi-layered territorial constructs; they ad-
dress the complex, yet not always visible, spatial, juridical, environmental and
geopolitical natures and conditions of the chosen sites, triggering the future
scenarios that are informed not only by conflict resolution and problem-
solving, but political propositions that address social degradation, climate
emergency and the crises of care and intimacy in multispecies communities.
Such scenarios dwell on micro- and macro-politics, from the scale of the
body to the territory.

Left: A hypothetical drawing of Noah’s Ark. A. Kircher, Arca Noë (Amsterdam: J. Janssonium a Waesberge, 1675).
Left: Details of St. Pancras baths and washhouses: interior bath, public baths and wash-houses, su-
perior bath, wringing machine, ironing and drying-room, hot air machine and washing-room. Wood
engraving, 1846. Wellcome Collection.

Following Edwin Chadwick’s sanitary reports of 1842, a ‘Committee for Baths for the Labouring
Classes’ was formed in October 1844 as a result of a high profile public meeting organised to address
the issue. It aimed to improve the sanitary conditions of the poor through the construction of pub-
licly accessible washing facilities. Beyond their functional role as sanitary facilities, they soon turned
into successful social infrastructures which improved communal life and neighbourhood bonds. in
1878 the Act was extended and led to erection of Swimming Bath that included more social facilities.
However they soon became highly class and gender segregated places.
Diploma Unit 7 addresses these aspects through a year-long research-by-
design project. It begins with a collective research that would serve individ-
ual projects; its own then to be developed in proper media format; models,
drawings, movies, photography that together envision possible futures for
the targeted territories and regions.

Within this framework, the territory stands at the centre of multi-scalar disputes.

We claim that territory should be seen as a political form.

The students are therefore engaging with the territory proactively. As any
actions inevitably imply a political vision. The unit’s projects aim to estab-
lish forms of association, among individuals, communities and collectives
between forces, space and subjects, and between human and non-human
agents.

Left: Waste Boundaries, Tanuj Kohli, DIP7 2020-21.

The Studio

In Term 1: Frame, Territory, Subjectivity, the unit will focus analysing and understanding of
the territory. Through three consecutive exercises on mapping the ‘targeted geographies’, the
‘flows and patterns’, and the ‘ecologies and systems’, the studio will produce collectively an atlas
of the Fluid Territories and its associated geographies. In the unit, we understand map¬ping as a
project; it is not simply an act of registering and representing cartographic information. It is pro-
jective since we select specific conditions, forces, and systems, and making them visible in order to
both reveal and realise hidden potentials. We also select historically and culturally specific means
of representation, drawing techniques and systems and units of measurement.

Throughout the first term, we will study the history and theories around the idea of territory and
its subjects, and we will discuss and exercise ways of projective engagement with the territories.
The synthesis of historical analyses, geographic features, modes of production, and forms of set-
tlements, in relation to specific socio-political context of the chosen site, will generate a frame of
relations, an organisational diagram that would eventually be developed into series of projective
drawings, models, written narratives, and moving/still images. The students will formulate their
own design brief that includes a position text (manifesto), outlining a projective statement that
would responds to the research questions, and a multi-scalar design proposal.
We will have series of day-long workshops on QGIS, Motion Graphics, and Editing Techniques,
next to seminars on Mapping, and Territorial Analyses.

Term 2: Towards a Project, will be dedicated to development of the design brief into site-
specific spatial interventions; projects should address multiple scales. The unit will host guest
lecturers who will reflect on different design methodologies. Detailed architectural proposals will
be informed by technical, structural, and environmental studies, through which the idea of the
project shall be entailed. Students will use different mediums such as models, drawings, writings,
and moving images, to develop and test their design proposals. We will have weekly seminar series
given by external guests and former Dip.7 students, presenting their research projects.

In the Term 3: The Image, parallel to consolidation of the proposals, we will develop custom-
made techniques of representation in order to convey the project in all applicable scales. We will
invite external guests to discuss methods of representation helping the students to choose the
best format for their projects.
We will have a symposium on Investigation/Representation in which we will bring together re-
searchers, architects and artists to explore the use of media and representation of space as a
form of multi-scalar investigation, from architecture to the territory and the urban. From ana-
logue tools, and modelling techniques, to publication, speakers will discuss key projects from their
practice that use artistic media beyond the pure representation of architecture but instead as a
systematic form of enquiry.

The Studio Fieldtrip will be organised in the UK during the open weeks. Depending on the level
of COVID-19 precautionary measures, series of guided group excursions will be planned during
in the Term 1 or 2, through which each student will test hypotheses and assumptions of his/her
own research project against the precedents and visited projects. This would help formulating
relevant design questions, to address a project for the territory and its subject(s).

Left: From Mud to Dust, Janos Bergob-Sowicz., DIP7 2019-20.

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Unit Masters:
Hamed Khosravi and Platon Issaias

Hamed Khosravi is an architect, researcher, and educator. He studied architecture in Tehran.

He holds a Post-graduate Masters in Urbanism from TU Delft and IUAV and a PhD from ‘The
City as a Project’ programme (Berlage Institute/TU Delft). He is currently a Studio Master at
Projective Cities, MPhil programme at the AA. His research and projects focus on the relationship
between architecture, territory, and politics of urban form.

Platon Issaias studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds an MSc from Columbia
University and a PhD from The City as a Project’ programme (Berlage Institute/TU Delft). Apart
from being a Studio Master at the AA, he is also the Programme Head of Projective Cities, MPhil
in Architecture and Urban Design. He practices with Fatura Collaborative, a research and design
collective.

Next page: The Fens: Protocols of Care for a Decaying Landscape, Amy Glover, DIP7 2020-2021.