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The state of the world is changing. By 2050, The earth’s population will increase by 3 billion and building sector is asked to construct 3 billion new housing units inside urban centres. Since one of the fundamental needs is food, agriculture sector also needs to adjust itself to this growing number of people. Nevertheless, in 2019, Agriculture used 50 per cent of all earth’s habitable land and experts estimate that we need 109 hectares more land to cultivate however this amount of habitable land is approximately the land which is represented by the country of Brazil and 20 per cent more. Moreover, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations states that water use grew twice as much as population increase and agriculture already is using approximately 70 per cent of the global freshwater. At this point, experts like Professor Dickinson Despommier suggests that the only way humanity can tackle its future food safety issues is to find ways to introduce vertical farming inside Urban centres. The High Garden project is resulted by the world state today and is trying to find an architectural solution to the mentioned issues. It starts firstly by studying the issues more thoroughly and then tries to form a framework which includes and transcends them. It studies how the construction sector is acting now and how it can reorient itself to the situation whilst limiting its negative environmental impact. Then the thesis tries to understand the basics of vertical farming methods compared to the conventional geoponics farming as it is practised today and how it can integrate the better cultivation solution inside city centres. The last step of the theoretical studies of the project is to look at the history of integrated farming and EcoArchitecture. After understanding the theories of the issue, then the thesis starts to form itself as an architectural intervention using the architectural tools and methods and combining the studied disciplines. The result of the thesis is a modular configuration which can accommodate various activities such as aeroponic farming, local markets, zen areas, and drone subscription deliveries etc. Because of the modular construction of the project, it can adapt and adjust itself to different situations and it uses an algorithmic tool to analyse and study existing cities to find proper intervention points. Then it is attached to the existing buildings as a sustainable green extension solving some issues and revitalizing the dead city edges. Keywords: State of the World, rapid urbanization, population growth, geoponic agriculture, Co2 emission, greenhouse gas emission, aeroponic farming, modular architecture, sustainable architecture, EcoArchitecture

On a national scale, statistics relating to moving patterns shows that youths and young adults are the ones who tend to move the most. The case in Västerbotten is similar as in the rest of Sweden and many municipalities are experiencing a population decline. This thesis aims to look into the motives behind moving from the perspective of youths and young adults and through that propose a strategy to strengthen the place attachment youths and young adults feel to their home municipality. The research is centered around Lycksele in Västerbotten.

The research questions that the thesis aims to seek answers for are; What could an architectural strategy that aims to support youths in their leisure time and also strengthen their connection to the area look like? and What programmatic aspects are important to consider in such a strategy?

The thesis investigates spatial needs from the perspective of youths and young adults which have been investigated through literature studies and action based research focused on interviews and a workshop. Four themes were common in both interviews and the workshop, these were; closeness to nature, possibility of work, valuable leisure time and a sense of home. To understand how an urban strategy can respond to the themes, strategies applied in other municipalities have been analysed. A finding was that in order for strategies to attract more inhabitants, they need to have a holistic approach and offer a complete lifestyle. Creativity is a theme which came up during interviews and literature studies as a possible platform around which an area can become considered as more attractive.

The proposal is an urban strategy which aims to respond to the common themes from interviews and the workshop by enhancing and encouraging activities taking place and activating social space. This proposal suggests a strategy which aims to strengthen the notion of sense of place to enhance place attachment and through that possibly invite more young adults to move back in the future.

This paper explores the ‘live project’ as a pedagogical tool in architectural education in South Africa: one that allows educators and students, through pedagogies-in-context, to access and develop deeply situated knowledge(s) in the context of community engagement. We propose the concept of pedagogies-in-context as pedagogies in multiple overlapping contexts: the physical and social contexts of the higher-education institution, the intellectual, pedagogical, and political contexts of the curriculum, and the socio-economic contexts of educators, students, and communities. A live project allows for multiple ways of being-in-context – as students, educators, researchers, and community members. The paper employs an exploration of and critical reflection on one particular live project. Based on the critical reflection, we propose that in the South African context, live projects can be understood as enterprises to reconstitute situated knowledge(s), thereby empowering students and educators to rewrite their own experiences of learning and teaching by making meaningful connections with communities.

Reconstruction and densification of Gamla storgatan in Holmsund.

The primary objective of ventilation in a building is to ensure that the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ), together with the heating system, keep the thermal climate at an acceptable level. Meaning the deployment of ventilation air at the appropriate temperature rate supplied to meet the thermal climate into the parts of the building where residents reside.

In Sweden, the two most commonly used ventilation strategies are stack ventilation and forced extract ventilation. Both methods utilize exhaust openings in kitchens and sanitary areas, while fresh air is drawn from either permeable external walls or through inlets located near windows and as distant as possible from the exhaust openings (Manz & Huber, 2000). Stack-effect ventilation, also known as buoyancy ventilation, utilizes convective forces. Thus, vertical interior openings such as stairways or atriums play an essential role in the distribution of air and its suitability. Utilizing additional building elements such as a chimney enhances the stack-effect ventilation by elevating the height of the “vertical core” of warm air within the structure. The disparity in density (the difference in temperature between hot and cold) increases as a result of the amplification of pressure disparities (Liu et al., 2010). Hence, larger differences in pressure between the inside and outside will result in an increased driving force for the stack effect by enhancing the convective currents. The principle operates by drawing cooler air from the exterior,generally from the bottom or sides of the building, into the building. The air is then gradually heated and ascends through the vertical core due to convective forces, before being ultimately discharged through the chimney (Savin & Jardinier, 2009).

The architectural proposal seeks to adhere to sustainable building development by employing deliberate steps that incorporate a combination of principles and strategies based on the theory of convection. In order to acquire knowledge and validation, an extensive investigation of case studies was carried out, with the works of Philippe Rahm serving as the fundamental basis for further development. Furthermore, a laboratory environment was established to conduct physical tests as well as virtual simulations (CFD) in order to gain deeper understanding and accuracy regarding the relationship between convective forces and geometry.

The thesis set out to place a bet based on the notion of consciousness, in terms of implementation of chosen principles, using materials with low embodied carbon, and employing a strategic geometric relationship. This approach enabled the design of an architectural proposal that is both responsive and educative, while also addressing the existing knowledge gap between different professions.

This paper will explore a new notion of urbanity in the context of planetary urbanisation, through the investigation and analysis of the following themes: urban-ecology, urban-infrastructure, and new processes of urbanisation.

Manifest

Today we live in a society were we live longer, with access to food,medicine, pure water with all services we could possibly need around the corner. Still we struggle with growing issues that our way of living and planning have affected us. Together we face issues of rising housing prices with a steady progressing marginalized rental market. Causing segregated gentrified areas of high income in comparison to low income. At the same time we contaminate the environment around us without reflecting of how we can alter our way of building and living instead. Previously we had access to pure air, water with tighter relations with our community, living with the nature without being a bystander that have distanced herself from it.

What have we lost along the way? I will through my project propose an alternative to how we plan our city today, by working from following points.

-Living in a natural landscape without implementing a generic city plan that do not consider the qualities of the site. I instead intend to take advantage of the natural qualities while combining them with our modern way of living.

--Living with nature without impeding long lasting harm to nature, this include treatment of wastewater from the housing.

-Creating a social diverse community by combining housing to prevent the development of a gentrified area of high income elite. As a part of this is to design affordable housing that low income groups can afford to rent or buy.

-Vivid community life by offering both public and private spaces, with community activities.

The food industry is one of the most pivotal sectors in our daily lives that in turn affect other fields such as our health, education, and our environment. Today 50% of all humans around the world live in cities and by 2050 that number is expected to have grown to 70%. This will inevitably increase the pressure on a steady stream of supplied food in a world where half of all land is already cultivated all while suffering the consequences of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. Therefore it is essential to revalue our food industry as even though we might be disconnected from the actual production, the consequences of our consumption pattern are certainly not. Through reconnecting the supplier with the ones being provided for there is the potential of increasing the awareness of our behavior. Enabling the possibility of attaining equilibrium by transitioning from a linear degenerative food system to one that is regenerative and distributive.

In order to understand the feasibility of such an endeavor, this thesis explores the market dynamics and consequences of the global food economy, in addition to how a local circular economy can achieve community stability in a highly volatile industry. This will inform the framework of the presented proposal in the context of Umeå and how local resources in combination with legislative policies can be utilized to bring back food production inside the city. This proposal will not solve the planetary imbalance of the food system but instead, see how it can be tackled locally and bring back the topic of food as an active collective responsibility. While how the architecture design can accommodate and adapt to allow for these communities to thrive.

As a concern for how new city developments invest in commercial

public space of economic activity rather than cultural activity and

inclusion, part of a global trend and also the case of Umeå’s ambition

to reach the population growth of 200 000 inhabitants by the year of

2050. The question to be asked in this regard is what kind of effect

does this produce on the way we as local inhabitants can take control

and be part of the creation of our own living environment? Or are

we just victims of a life consumed by slow decay due to the capital

dominance?

In relation to this main concern, the project has been developing

through the aspect of acknowledging inferior space and abandoned

objects as a method and typology to analyze alternative ways to

perceive the city off based the logic of clear function and use, but in

terms of human interaction and subjective perception of space. The

point of departure and important key element for this development

derived from the early stages of research and influential work by

Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic New Jersey, (1967) with

a main quote on the description of Smithson’s work and the term of

monuments, here defined by Ann Reynolds as: “how something plot

out and charge a space with meaning”

Learning from memory traces of an abandoned set of futures evoked

the idea and strive towards creating space not tied to a specific

use or function, but as a collaboration and juxtaposition between

form and the viewer’s experience. In add to an understanding of a

presence which ties together the past and the present as an indirect

translation of the developed concept for contemporary Ruins, as the

perception of void. The ruins association to object defined through

the observer became a guideline towards the aim of designing nonhierarchical

space, free of us and interpreted by the visitor within the

city scape.

Based on this foundation this thesis aims to examine the possibilities

of architectural structures which can encourage and create conditions

for new cultural and social meetings. The abstract concept of space

and deliberate openness to interpretation can allow the visitor to

take co-authorship of their own living environment based on their

personal understanding and imagination of that space. The action

is by deliberate disjunction between form and viewer’s experience

forced by a superimposition plan as a design strategy for redeveloping

the current Döbelns Park into a new culture park in the city context

of Umeå, Västerbotten, Sweden. Fragments of the park will in add

create a system of integrated monumental sculpture scapes, as a

network of in-between small scale interventions adapting to specific

site conditions together with implemented greenery. To secure areas

within the city scape with access to greenery and social interactive

meeting points, part of the Urban strategy.

The contemporary understanding of well-being has been shaped by societal ideas that long-term happiness of life is achieved by meeting and securing certain needs. These needs have been shaped by physical necessities as well as perceived needs, cravings. This misconception about well-being is problematic because it bases our well-being on circumstantial factors rather than identifying it as something found within ourselves. By considering well-being as a consequence of an external factor, we nurture a culture of striving and consumption. Ideas of achieving well-being through accumulation harm our environment whilst moving our source of well-being away from ourselves.

If we instead try to accept well-being unconditionally, by understanding how our minds work, we can nurture not only ourselves but our surroundings. Mindfulness practice is used to break the illusion in our experience where it seems that we are a self (an ego, centered behind your face/eyes riding along in a body) (with needs that correspond to this ego/self). It creates an opportunity to relate to the own experience in a new way that can include more layers of the world.

The essay tries to spatialize mindfulness practice through four steps towards a greater insight of the mind. This aims to create opportunities to critically reflect upon the own mind and to break the illusions about the self. The essay tries to understand if architectural elements can help the user to question their experiences and thus enable new insights into what the experience is (intrinsically / in itself) and question what it means. The project will also lead the user to question its own physiological needs and create a symbiosis with the well-being of the natural environment. This hopes to create an opportunity for the user to include new layers of themselves, where the planet and life on it are included. 

When we can break the illusion of the self, we will gain a greater understanding of what well-being for ourselves can be, which means that we can include the well-being of others in our own and become actors for well-being rather than secure future well-being for ourselves.

Awareness is the experiencing in life. It is how you experience being yourself in your surroundings moment by moment. But of all the possible things you can be aware of in the moment, it is something that always takes the spotlight. Attention is that directing spotlight. Attention is the focus in the open field of awareness. Attention is something that we have all the time, but it seems to be constrained to the experience of a thought or emotion that we have in the moment. We have a feeling that we are our thoughts and therefor as soon as something arises in the mind, we have an urge to strive towards what´s pleasant and pushing away what´s not. But the attention is directed towards what seems more important at the moment and our values can therefor change due to the circumstance that we are in, and instead of acting in our environment, we react. Meanwhile we habitually direct our attention towards so many things that we hope will contribute to our wellbeing, that we don’t have time to see that we are directing the attention in the completely wrong direction. Wellbeing isn’t the effect of any outer condition, it is a state of mind. Our minds are the space where our lives are played out. Which means that the only thing we could possibly have control over, is how we respond to the situations that occur in our lives. 

To make us the director of our attention, to not lose more moments to a momentary reactive mind is hard. During my investigations of how Japanese architectural strategies activates the mind, the aim for my project was developed, to shape spaces that activates awareness. The challenge is to not direct the attention in another direction, but to put the attention on attention itself. This project tries to do this by merging body with space, or by making the mind the space. 

The ATLAS presented in this section is the result of a call for students’ projects based on the topic FOLLIES in the public realm as objects and places of delight and pleasure and, therefore, of fun and happiness. Follies were to be thought of as urban devices that would trigger the social and cultural transformation of cities, as mechanisms for positive social change, and as attractive structures to promote encounters between people and between people and places.

Have you ever thought about how dependent you are of the systems in society - the government, the municipalities, and the economy in an everyday life perspective? Probably you have, but have you thought about how much? Imagine a day when it is -20°C outside and the power goes off. What do you do?

If you are not prepared - like most Swedes aren’t - you soon have no way of heating your home, put on the lights, cook food or take a warm shower. Today you are supposed to be able to survive without governments help for one week in case of a crisis. Most of us can’t manage that.

I think it’s absurd how much we all depend on these systems. It’s scary. The population of the world is growing and by 2050, 75% of the population will be living in and around cities. Today 42% of the worlds land surface is used for farmland. Can we expect that the government will provide food for all of us? We need to be able to be self-sufficient within the borders of the city, and not only in the countryside.

My project is not about going off the grid and being 100% self-sufficient. It’s an experiment to see if it is possible for people to live without governments help to provide power, food, water and heat in a city environment, both in the everyday life and in case of crises.  It´s about taking small steps for helping the environment, ourselves and society. Being self-sufficient doesn’t mean you can’t keep your job or your hobbies; today the technology is so developed, making it possible to be self-sufficient without having to give up our time. The project will be placed on a vertical scale to make the footprint as small as possible and to see how many people it is possible to host in that limited area.

The programs in the project are divided into three categories: food production, technology, and social programs. In my research, I’ve mainly focused on food production using both vertical farming and traditional farming. Other systems that I also focused on are the technological aspects for creating a passive building and a bioclimatic design using passive solar systems.

The site that I have chosen is on Ön, an island in central Umeå. For several decades, several generations of politicians in Umeå have discussed the future of the island but have now proposed a new city plan with a total of 3600 apartments. The planning is based on building ecologically, economically, technically as well as socially sustainable, which I’m hoping to achieve with my project. My plan is to take over a small block for my project, thus the design is adapted to the site and its conditions.

My general impression after 3 days of intense and hectic activity and exposure to many different kinds of work is that of an extremely diverse production. The Master’s Theses produced at the Department of Architecture at Chalmers are very different not only in their themes and issues but also in their formats, procedures and in the very definition of the thesis as a “thing”.

Far from seeing this as a problem, I consider this one of the most interesting aspects and one of the strengths of the school and its production. Against an ever-growing trend towards profiling and specialization, and especially an illdriven demand for standardization in the name of quality, I find it not only refreshing and brave but also paramount that the school maintains and encourages an environment in which many different understandings of a Master’s thesis coexist and even challenge each other. I have seen interesting text-based, written theses that are pure research and reflection; complex research projects with an associated design proposal; purely formal and material speculations and explorations through the development of very specific building assignments; urban interventions within well defined and researched social contexts; research reports with an emphasis on sustainable development; and a few other…

The paper aims at thinking through the collaborative process of conceiving and making an ‘impossible’ room inside Umeå School of Architecture: a small, more intimate, warm and silent space – a room that floats in the air – thought as an alternative to the excessively open, cold and loud spaces of the building. The room is at the same time a u-topian space and a practice of world transformation: an impossible room in relation to the difficulties of its materialization and to its performance as a critique of the discursive, regulatory and regulated space of the university; and an act of construction that operates not only through material re-arrangements and the physical transformation of the spaces of the school but also with important effects regarding symbolic capitals, relational ecologies, the lives of those involved, shared responsibilities and the establishment of the common.

Exploring this ‘something common’ involves developing alternative value systems in order to document and judge the effects of the ‘intravention’ both in the spaces of the school and in the times, academic experiences and, particularly, the lives of the actors involved in or affected by the project.

We will be using two other transversal notions along that of intravention: the idea of technologies of experience will help us think through and develop ways of affording spatial experiences instead of looking at technology as an isolated, autonomous construct; and the idea of collaborative affordance, suggesting that straightforward, uncomplicated solutions enable an experience of participation/contribution that can yield effects in terms of the responsibility, care and fidelity to the things built by those involved in its design and construction.

We believe architecture must move away from divisions between theory and practice - or thinking and making - and incorporate also affective and non-representational dimensions to the task of ‘architecting’ the world. This can happen through the production and invention of new ways of thinking/making/feeling – or caring – transversally and inseparably based on the specific conditions of a situation, privileging an open-ended, processual and experience-based way of knowing and being in the world.

In relationship with the proposed dimensions of ‘worlding’ and ‘u-topos’, the paper aims at thinking through the collaborative process of conceiving and making an ‘impossible’ room inside Umeå School of Architecture: a small, more intimate, warm and silent space – a room that floats in the air – thought as an alternative to the excessively open, cold and loud spaces of the building.

The room is at the same time a u-topian space and a practice of world transformation: an impossible room in relation to the difficulties of its materialization and to its performance as a critique of the discursive, regulatory and regulated space of the university; and an act of construction that operates not only through material re-arrangements and the physical transformation of the spaces of the school but also with important effects regarding symbolic capitals, relational ecologies, the lives of those involved, shared responsibilities and the establishment of the common.

Through the performative, we shift our attention from what a thing looks like to what a thing does, and from objects and artefacts to ‘movements’ as well as to the effects of our practices and actions in life. This transformational ‘mode’ echoes the notion of worlding – with its accompanying history of ‘indefinition’ and indetermination as well as its clear co-responsive engagement in the making of the world – and locates us in the realm of ‘situatedness’, or inside phenomena. We are within, and active parts of, specific situations that we encounter in relationship to a series of concerns, things that really matter and that have to do with the ongoing becoming of the world. Becoming inside these situations requires a certain fidelity, a certain willingness to stay and to endure; a caring in duration. In this duration it is both possible and necessary to develop situated knowledges, which emerge as ‘ways-of-doing-and-making’ from our engagement in worlding practices, practices which are also, for that reason, learning experiences.

While the ‘globalized’ architectural discipline continuous its immersion in a trend that privileges quantitative and mediated experiences, Peter Zumthor’s small office/workshop in Haldenstein - a small village in the swiss Graubünden – works by slowly developing each assignment to the last detail, always privileging the quality of the final result as the maximum value and top priority. Regardless of the rash global competition to attract the media, Zumthor carefully chooses his clients, does not allow the re-printing of his own monograph and proves himself very reluctant at the time of accepting interviews. Often, he affords certain moments to take some distance and reflect critically about his own creative activity and about the essence of architecture, what has led to a number of texts, concepts and categories that are extremely interesting from the point of view of representation. The text that follows explores and revisits some of those ideas and categories through a reading and a translation of some of his texts that tries to relate them to his work. More particularly, the article “Partituren und Bilder. Architektonische Arbeiten aus dem Atelier Peter Zumthor. 1985-1988” that was part of an exhibition held with the same name at the Architekturgalerie in Lucern, only available in German, has been translated as well as another text and interview held around the house Luzi.

This paper reflects on the need for another approach to the concept of habitability; for collective solutions and proposals at all scales, transversally and simultaneously, from the room to the city, restoring the value of the collective as an alternative to prevailing fragmentation and individualism. Faced with those practices that are either entertained in the incessant production of new forms, or are aligned with the neoliberal system in the task of producing and absorbing surplus, at the expense of creative destruction of the urban space and the territory, there is an urgent need for other ways to firmly and uncompromisingly approach the task of planning coexistence. It is imperative to move beyond the formal and typological, incorporating not only the well-known rhetoric of adaptation, dissociation and other contemporary rituals of the private, but also the critical planning of those common, collective, public and intermediate spaces that promote sociability and co-existence, and make it possible to share spaces, resources and experiences.

Algunos han anunciado, optimistamente temprano, el colapso de la denominada “starchitecture”, la arquitectura global contemporánea que domina los mercados de la mano de una élite de arquitectos de la ciudad global, ahora distribuidores y suministradores de iconografías urbanas que van definiendo a su vez una imagen global: la cara visible del planeta. Decimos optimista, porque no estaría mal presenciar el fin de un entramado que beneficia sólo a los miembros de un selecto club de arquitectos globales, políticos y poderosos. Y temprano, porque parece que a pesar del simbólico incendio del edificio TVCC en Pekín el pasado febrero de 2009 y los estragos causados por la crisis mundial, la arquitectura global y sus huecos productos continúan triunfando.

The paper reflects on the need for another approach to the concept of habitability that would allow the application of collective solutions and proposals simultaneously and transversally at all scales, from the room to the city, reclaiming the values of the collective as an alternative to the reigning individualism and atomization.

In front of those practices that either linger in the unstoppable race to produce the new and its new shapes and forms or align with neoliberal currents in the production and absorption of surplus values at the cost of the creative destruction of urban spaces and territories, one must claim the urgent need of other ways of doing and making that engage decisively and uncompromisingly in the task of designing coexistence.

It is paramount and indispensable to advance beyond the formal and typological, incorporating not only the already known discourses of adaptability, dissociation and other contemporary private rituals but also the critical design of common, collective, public and intermediate spaces that foster sociability and conviviality making the sharing of spaces, resources and experiences possible.

It seems as if the city, its space, its future, its production, were almost exclusively the result of a series of processes and flows taking place at unreachable distance, in un-known locations, mostly determined by the interests and wills of un-localized powers, actors and flows. As if the city could no longer be produced and shaped after the desires of its inhabitants, articulating one or another form of collective will. As if the city was no longer the soul and reason of urban politics but just the mere object of a kind of witty and hygienic managing that understands built space as a market and a product, placing economy at the very center of society.

Urban agendas no longer include distributive and social considerations but focus now on economic growth, competitiveness and entrepreneurship. Creative flexibility, efficiency and strategic partnership exclude dissent, conflict and radical criticism nearly foreclosing the political from the face of the city. Cityspace anesthetized. Public space today is planned, designed, defined, segregated, policed, and set up in order to be easily controlled, ‘secured’, and ‘marketized’, in ways that lead to homogenous, uninteresting, smooth and clean surfaces that differ very much from the inherent characteristics of the very idea of public.

The general qualities of Peter Zumthor’s work, an extremely careful, sensitive, slow and respectful craft, make his nearly perfect architecture a very interesting object for analysis and research. All the more so in these times of vertiginous production and an almost blind exaltation of the new and the original, a time when the discipline of architecture, and consumer society in general, are moving more and more away from constructive traditions and from the wisdom of master builders. His work is a somewhat ‘resisting’ position, a fruitful and hopeful moving forward against the current, carried out on the basis of a very special reading of the place and its traditions, a very wise and precise selection of materials and a desire to approach technical and sensitive excellence in each and every aspect of the process and the built result.

The optimism emanating from the opening quote, which I fundamentally share, confronts a grim landscape of universal cynicism, toxic capitalism and liberal, fake ethics. Those seem to be the reigning kings of the world we live in. Or in other words, shit-is-fucked-up-and-bullshit. The sentence, as found in the placards of some of the Occupy protesters, can be read in different ways. On the one hand, 

one could see it as the epitome of modern cynicism, which Sloterdijk has famously described as “enlightened false consciousness”2 ; in this case, the informed consciousness that ‘shit is fucked up’, i.e. things are going quite bad and everything is out of control, we are not in control – no one is in control – and those in power are ‘bullshitting’ us while selling out to investors. There is no way out… we can’t do anything but continue expressing our cynical critique and turning our back on reality to focus on our own, already difficult, survival. On the other hand, the sentence could also be understood as the necessary denunciation of an unacceptable state of things, a loud cry that signals a profound disappointment and acts as the starting point of a search for justice, one that could thrust things towards what Simon Critchley has recently called an ethics of commitment and political resistance.3 

It is certainly an active stance that I believe we should take, and one that avoids falling on the side of active nihilism: it is not about bringing this world down, destroying it and putting a new one in its place, but rather about transforming it radically from within. We have to imagine (and make become) another future, using the imaginative space of architecture, through the direct engagement in here-and-now situations. My suggestion is that sharing, displacing, caring might be important and necessary ingredients of such a demanding endeavour. In what follows below, I will try to sketch out what I mean by each of those verbs and the implications of such a performative approach for spatial practices.

The paper presents a reflection on the role of architecture in the age of global tourism and the post-political. It also examines the future of tourism in the face of a looming decline in the availability of cheap fossil fuels as a result of the so-called ‘peak oil’. Beyond the postmodern understanding of a metaphorical end of tourism based on ideas of “de-differentiation” and the coming together of tourism, work and everyday life, the paper moves toward the consideration of the possibilities for new forms of leisure and free time that could incorporate another idea of cultural exchange after the end of tourism as we know it. Instead of spectacle, the paper explores dreams and speculations about new utopian mobilities and encounters with the other beyond mere departures.

This paper will explore an alternative to so-called „sustainable‟ models and strategies currently applied in the field of building, architecture and urbanism. In front of irrational resource consumption and an ever-growing waste generation or other problems, seemingly inherent to the current industrial productive model and now transferred to the production of space, the most critical and concerned sectors within these disciplines keep on applying scale-segregated sustainable solutions, i.e. working and intervening at the scale of the single built unit, or at that of the urban model.

Instead, the paper will explain ongoing research related to the possibilities of generating another model based in the concept of “global habitability”, that would allow the application of those and other new solutions and mechanisms at all scales in a much more holistic approach to the implementation of sustainability: working transversally and simultaneously, from the room to the city.

If current strategies aim at an increase in efficiency exclusively based in the reduction of resource consumption and waste generation, the new model would propose a redefinition of the other term intervening, namely utility. The very subject of sustainability is changed here through this redefinition; no more space but activity, no more the object but the process.

Utility and use within architecture can be identified with habitability, here understood as the achievement of adequate social and environmental conditions in order to satisfy the socially acknowledged basic needs of people. Two different factors would determine such idea of utility: on the one hand the conditions of matter‟, as an expression of requirements related to space, resource flows and equipment needed to develop an activity; and on the other hand, the conditions of „orgware‟ or „privacy‟, another term that would include synergy – as the relation between the level of individuality and the level of collectivity - and management, as a combination of time, control and legislation.

The main aim of the paper will be thus to present this reformulation of the idea of „habitability‟ as the only effective strategy towards an implementation of sustainability in the field of building. A systemic intervention, re-thinking the utility of architecture from the smallest spatial unit (the room) and extending its scale to that of the urban services (i.e. providers of any need that can‟t be fulfilled within the dwelling), allows achieving the maximum efficiency in terms of resource consumption; whereas social focus, incorporating individual, collective and organizational demands, allows the strategy to take roots in society expanding, thus, the likelihood of its success.

There are various forms of collective housing that propose and rehearse many different forms of sharing functions, spaces and other "things". Social and public housing usually encourage one or other form of sharing in search of affordability. Experiences of cooperative building often include shared facilities and spaces, some times shared activities. Student housing, women dormitories, workers dormitories, elderly homes, asylum homes, camps, monasteries, schools and other situations and forms of habitation offer multiple examples of diverse degrees and ways of sharing "things" through and in architecture. Multi-family dwelling, co-housing and many self-built initiatives and developments involve various degrees of shared and common spaces, often aiming at encouraging encounter, social exchange and collaboration.

Common Life is the theme of the third term of the MA programme at the "Laboratory of Immediate Architectural Intervention", taught at Umeå School of Architecture. The main course in the term is called "Architectural Intervention, Realization and Consequences" and it aims at enabling the students to adopt a more reflective approach after their first year, in order to start developing a position as architects and as researchers. The semester is also a transition towards the final term in which students are to develop their Master's Theses. This publication gathers the results of a collective effort to carry out a research assignment that is conceived to prepare the students for some of the challenges they will have to face in order to complete those theses. 

The course focuses on architecture's ability to provide, through its transformative power, conditions of 'possibility' for the sharing of various spaces, times, processes and other things. Producing uncertainties, contingent relationships and unexpected effects can help define more positive value systems than that of the building-as-consumable-object. We understand the building as a relational object within a complex meshwork of other things, people and technologies, and we explore the notion of architecture-as-an-emergent-'gift': a relational practice that enables encounter(s), and affords the sharing of moments, conversations and, why not, lives. Inhabiting the spaces, discourses and events of this common life, we try to develop a faithful and true care for the situations we are enmeshed in, and perhaps discover ways to displace what is, in order to 'architect' what could be and what ought to be. 

Homes are very close to us, we inhabit them with our bodies, emotions and thoughts, we make them and they make us. How much are we ready to share of our lives? What can we obtain from sharing? What can we share? Are there degrees of sharing? What is our role as architects and the role of architecture in affording such 'sharings'?

We begin setting out our thoughts on immediate architectural interventions with a couple of considerations. One of them addresses the architectural profession’s progressive disconnection from the social, from the political, from history, from the local, from ethics, from the body, from the ‘discipline’ itself. A whole generation of architects has abandoned the design of coexistence - undoubtedly one of the main tasks of architecture – in order to embrace, on the one hand, the serial fabrication of what we see as anti-architectures that repeat types, materials and structural systems on the basis of a pragmatic and productive juxtaposition of normative restrictions and the interests of bankers, investors, and developers; and on the other hand, the production of ‘stunning’ unique prototypes of image-architecture that satisfy the ill, self-worshipping yearnings of architects mired in the ceaseless luxury of formal exploration for the sake of form. We are critical of what is being embraced and of the practices that perpetuate disconnection from lived lives.

We define architecture not as an ‘it’ but as a process, or an apparatus; in our sense, architecture is a verb: to architect. Rather than refer to the (paradoxical) limiting of intervention’s in-between, we posit a new concept: intravention. Intra’s focus on the ‘within’ establishes intraventions as already a part of the spaces and times in which they are ‘intravening’.We find this a very productive notion, one which is useful in defining the (makeshift) edges of specific situations with which we engage; it helps us negotiate the expanse of the relational meshwork of material, sensory and discursive flows, and allows us to start ‘doing/making’ immediately. When we ‘intravene’, we cut within the site we inhabit to conceive and construct it. It also speaks about intentionality: one decides what the intravention includes or excludes. It is therefore an intensely political act, as well as an aesthetic one. We will discuss the notion of intravention in relationship to its ability to interfere with the complex making of the city and the world, articulating, detonating, and re-articulating relations, actions and intra-actions between various things, apparatuses, people, ANTs, spiders and, very possibly, sugar dispensers.