The rhythms and routines of (un)sustainable Nordic urban landscapes

Key for this discussion is how “sustainable urban design” tends to displace and exclude sites of work and economy of the disadvantaged: factories, mills, distribution centers, hospitals, and other sites necessary for a “local” ecological economy yet remarkably absent from most sustainable solutions. The discussion will further address this as an urban design challenge through Jacques Lévy’s differentiation of spatial capitals: position capital as that which is available in the local environment and situation capital as that which allows one to overcome deficiencies in the position capital. The essay asks what it would mean to refocus urban design to primarily engage with the lives of those with little situation capital, instead of considering the mobile, urban, cosmopolitan subject as its key protagonist – whether living in ‘urbanity’ or in the countryside – a change that is especially important in light of climate change and global justice challenges calling for what Nancy Fraser defines as transformative strategies.

The seminar is intended to discuss the essay ‘as-is’, as well as how to take this work further into future projects, publications, and contexts.

Please contact Daniel Koch daniel.koch@arch.kth.se for a copy of the manuscript.

Bio Daniel Koch is a Docent in Architecture and Associate Professor in Urban design with a specialization in spatial analysis at KTH School of Architecture. His research spans from complex public and semi-public buildings to urban design, with a combined focus on the production of subjectivity, social structuration, and sustainability challenges in relation to architectural and spatial configurations. The research is provisionally defined as developing a field called "critical morphology”. Daniel is also Programme Director for the interdisciplinary Master’s Programme Sustainable Urban Planning and Design, from which this paper draws some of its material. In addition, the seminar paper develops on critical points in previous publications “The Bubble, The Arrow and the Area” (in The New Urban Condition), “The Smart City in the Smaller Context” (in The Physical and the Digital City), and "On Architectural Space and Modes of Subjectivity” (in Urban Planinng).

Opponent José Hernández Vargas is an architect and PhD student at the Department of Building Science at KTH in Stockholm. His current research focuses on developing design-to-manufacture processes for robotic fabrication with concrete, for the production of optimized 3D printed concrete elements. This research is framed in a sustainability context and aims to integrate digital fabrication and reuse of concrete elements as a sustainable alternative for concrete construction.