What kinds of principles can put these rights into action? Looking at the selections in this year’s U.S. Pavilion, we can start to identify urban counter-dynamics that suggest what some of these principles might be. Rather than reacting against capitalist imperatives, they respond to opportunities; as much as solving problems, they offer possibilities. This short list of principles is only a starting point for an extensive catalog of ideas. Collectively, these ideas produce a very different view of capitalism, not as the all-powerful machine that Marxist theorists describe, but more like a tattered fabric, with many openings that can be occupied by practices that are not so much anticapitalist as they are noncapitalist.
The first opening is defamiliarization, the modernist cultural practice of “making strange.” Applied to the urban environment, unlikely insertions or juxtapositions of uses can unsettle our existing perceptions of urban life and space, opening up new possibilities and invigorating the idea of what a city can be. After seeing what is a normally car-filled street instead packed with Critical Mass bicyclists or with parking spaces transformed into mini-parks on PARK(ing) Day, the city will never look the same.
Refamiliarization then inverts defamiliarization, by making urban spaces more familiar, more domestic, and more like an interior. Inserting private activities and qualities into the public realm encourages people to sit, eat, and converse in unlikely places. This can dramatically alter urban situations, making what were harsh places feel more like home. In addition, refamiliarization, by colliding two realities that are usually opposed, can itself be a form of defamiliarization.
Spatial actions can also reconfigure economic processes. Hijacking or borrowing urban spaces for unintended uses, substituting use value for exchange value, can temporarily remove land from its market context and question its status as a commodity. We have seen the appearance of multiple alternative economies: recycling, bartering, gift exchange, methods of redistributing and remaking goods, information-sharing, and experiences based on generosity, usefulness, and pure play.
Finally, a new politics of collaboration underlies many of these efforts, and it is not based on preconstituted subjects or roles. Instead, the new politics involves particular groups and individuals emerging in response to highly specific circumstances, and it takes innumerable forms, ranging from crowdsourcing to intimate personal encounters.
Lefebvre proposed building “experimental utopias”—imaginings given concrete form—as the first step in acquiring rights to the city. Doing exactly that are the projects featured in Spontaneous Interventions, all of which are grounded in actual cities yet are expansive in their reimagining of urban life. The projects’ divergent goals, varied methods, and multifarious participants should be seen as strengths rather than weaknesses. They are openings towards a new urban politics, still to be discovered.
Margaret Crawford is a professor at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the evolution, uses, and meanings of urban space. She is also known for her work on “everyday urbanism,” a concept that encourages the close investigation of the specifics of daily life as the basis for urban theory and design.
