IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Cities, have been simultaneously framed as the pinnacle progress and locations of squalor, as utopias and dystopias, as battlefields and dreamscapes. Without doubt, they have been and continue to be the location of contrast, contradiction, contestation and conflict. In order to respond to increasing inequality and precarity, and to instigate and just change, spatial design and planning fields will have to abandon their reliance on stable and reliable socio-economic-ecological systems and learn to operate within what Baumann (2000 and 2006) calls “liquid modernity” – a world that is characterized by instability and ambiguity and by the erosion of apparent stable or solid categories of identity as well as by the elusiveness and opacity of systems of power (e.g. Castells 1997). Central to this proposition is the concept of “unsettling” (Whittaker 1642, Mills 1844, Laclau 1990, Roskamm 2017). Architecture, landscape architecture and planning have relied on “settling” conflicts and differences, finding compromise to attenuate or eliminate conflict, and frequently engaged in the manufacturing of consensus. These practices victimize already traumatized, marginalized and disenfranchised communities. This paper explores strategies and tactics in highly contested situations, argues for, and presents elements of critical, action-oriented spatial practices that meaningfully engage conflict, and focus on dissent as a central dimension of community-engaged action. Instead of centering on the creation of spatial imaginaries, unsettlement is a tool for the retrieval and engagement of memories, past histories and experiences of violence and hope as well as a platform to subvert extant power differentials and engage habitually excluded communities.