Beyond the meta-institutions such as government, the economy, healthcare or education, are nested sub-institutions, such as religion or sexual identity that, when considered in the abstract, reveal the mechanisms through which institutional resistance is most likely to be realised. Institutions are not static symbols of power but are awarded power through routine interactions and collective complicity.

Researchers within this group are, by implication, working across a range of diverse meta and sub institutions. Examples of their work include: an interrogation of architectural education’s gendered pedagogies through the lens of fourth-wave feminist theory and inter-sectionality theory; architecture and urban form in light of contemporary militant institutional analyses, mental healthcare and changing political regimes; the modern Californian, carceral institution beyond its immediate role of confining, reforming and punishing criminals, and as an agent of normalisation active across both the urban and rural domains; and the intersection between international law and urban development at the neighbourhood scale and the impact upon diasporas situated across jurisdictional divides.

Some of the questions addressed by this research group include: Can inequalities within the educational institution be adequately challenged by pedagogic reform and curricula decalcification? Can a spatial, sociological and anthropological understanding of the built environment contest structural inequalities across territorial contexts? Can architecture mount a direct challenge to the cultural logics, representations, and schemata that characterise institutions and, in doing so, address the inequalities that they seem to instigate or perpetuate?

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On 18 December 2018, the Indonesian Supreme Court revoked Article 25 Paragraph 1 Jakarta by-law No.8/2007 that the Jakarta governor had introduced the previous year. Through this law, the governor aimed to protect and support informal commercial activities in inhabiting the streets. The governor's decision to provide support for activities, such as street vendors, hawkers, peddlers, and buskers who operate on the sidewalks, came as a surprise to many and was discussed as controversial in the press. Highly dependent on this law, the governor went against popular opinion that sees the street activities as problematic, even though they make up almost 70 per cent of Indonesia's economy. The law's repeal in Article 25 Paragraph 1 was made in response to a lawsuit filed by two members of the House of Representatives, which aimed to 'protect' the city's streets from being populated by unwanted street activities. This criminalisation of street activities has had a dramatic effect on the livelihoods of many and lead to a series of evictions carried out by the ​Satpol PP, the municipal police unit in Jakarta. For instance, in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta, no less than 650 fabric and clothes vendors, which existed for more than thirty years, came under the threat of losing​ their spaces to make way for 'cleaner' sidewalks​.

This paper will discuss the impact this court ruling has had since it went into effect immediately in 2018. It will present a reading of four prominent national newspapers in Indonesia, ​Kompas, ​Media Indonesia, ​ Poskota​ and ​the Jakarta Post​ on how they depict the informal commercial activities in Jakarta's streets. Articles and photographs in these newspapers will be used to capture the transformation of informal activities but will also help to trace the change of perception that lead to the public’s rejection of traditional activities and its taste for a more generic urban imaginary. Analysing newspaper articles and Instagram posts, this paper will also show how informal commercial activities appeared quite resistant to the police measures, with some vendors and buskers developing sophisticated mechanisms and neighbourhood initiatives to avoid the threat of eviction. Seemingly, their presence is finally being appreciated by ordinary citizens whose stories are rarely presented in the media. Understanding these alternative stories might suggest a more nuanced approach in urban planning that involves Jakarta inhabitants from different backgrounds and financial incomes.

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Beyond the meta-institutions such as government, the economy, healthcare or education, are nested sub-institutions, such as religion or sexual identity that, when considered in the abstract, reveal the mechanisms through which institutional resistance is most likely to be realised. Institutions are not static symbols of power but are awarded power through routine interactions and collective complicity.

Researchers within this group are, by implication, working across a range of diverse meta and sub institutions. Examples of their work include: an interrogation of architectural education’s gendered pedagogies through the lens of fourth-wave feminist theory and inter-sectionality theory; architecture and urban form in light of contemporary militant institutional analyses, mental healthcare and changing political regimes; the modern Californian, carceral institution beyond its immediate role of confining, reforming and punishing criminals, and as an agent of normalisation active across both the urban and rural domains; and the intersection between international law and urban development at the neighbourhood scale and the impact upon diasporas situated across jurisdictional divides.

Some of the questions addressed by this research group include: Can inequalities within the educational institution be adequately challenged by pedagogic reform and curricula decalcification? Can a spatial, sociological and anthropological understanding of the built environment contest structural inequalities across territorial contexts? Can architecture mount a direct challenge to the cultural logics, representations, and schemata that characterise institutions and, in doing so, address the inequalities that they seem to instigate or perpetuate?

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The United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugee defines the rights of individuals who are granted asylum as well as the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum. The Convention was approved at a special United Nations Conference on 28th July 1951 and entered into force three years later. It was initially limited to protecting European refugees. Following the 1967 protocol, these limits were lifted, meaning that it would apply to anyone, anywhere in the world. However, the status relating to the ‘refugee’ has been – and remains – open to interpretation by various governments and institutions. These differing interpretations have made today’s humanitarian crisis increasingly complex, in so far as they have played a role in the production of alternative identities to that of the ‘refugee’.

This paper argues that national and international law, in conjunction with architecture – such as borders, camps, detention centres, registration centres and deportation waiting zones – through which refugees have to move on their difficult journey are complicit in the violent act of producing the internally displaced, the refugee, the illegal immigrant, the detainee, the asylum applicant, and the deportee. Such encounters between law and architecture expose people fleeing conflict to new forms of discrimination be they institutional or otherwise.

The highly codified space of a legal forum, and in particular the 1951 United Nations Convention, is therefore a crucial moment to analyse and understand as a turning point in the formalisation of international naming practices for displaced people. Existing scholarship on management and governance through categorisation of identity within varying settings that a displaced person traverses has tended to ignore the fact that the operations that take place within them are not only administrative but also inherently extractive. These operations therefore set out to extract a form of value from the body of the displaced through biometric and logistical processes, thus converting the person and their body to a resource for financial or political gain. As a case study to exemplify the shifting identities of a person and their legal and logistical consequences, the paper will present research focused on the conditions of refugees on the island of Lesvos.

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As New Dubai was being built in the 1970s, a series of new policies were introduced designed to aid Emirati citizens, often described as a form of ‘wealth-sharing and a right of citizenship’, as the minority within their homeland. One such policy was the ‘set back’ rule. This particular policy, driven by modernist ideologies and economic growth transformed not only the urban fabric, which has been widely documented, but less publicised is the impact it had on the interior planning of the villa and the daily rituals of the inhabitants. Increased plot sizes (30x80m) were inherently connected to citizens’ socio-economic status. With the introduction of the ‘set back’ policy in 1975 this brought about ‘rows’, that set back villas and separated them from the next villa, replacing the clustering approach. A sight which was familiar in the suburbs of the US at the time but very different from the previous clustered neighbourhoods that embraced notions of traditional community structures.

One of the many impacts of the ‘set back’ policy was the impact it had on ordinary daily rituals. With neighbourhoods being less dense and focusing less on pedestrian accessibility, women and children who used to be able to walk privately between villas in the cool Sikka’s, no longer did. The mixed-use corridors and open landscape that once allowed integration between families and a sense of community, was replaced with low densities, spread out streets accommodating cars. With villa’s separated and enclosed by the boundary wall and road, socialising happened within the plots and not organically in the community. Over time and subjected to more standardisation and planning policies, spatial outcomes have become autonomous, with little regard to the user. This leaves us with an interesting situation of citizens abandoning the prescribed spatial standards of government villas and designing their own villas that meet their spatial and cultural needs. As The arid climate and Arab culture brought people together, yet the fast-tracked urban development, driven by the discovery of Oil and its Western interests has had impacts that are beyond localised organic growth.

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Redes da Maré is an organisation based in Maré, one of sixteen favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Formalised in 2007, the organisation focuses on improving life conditions in Maré, particularly strengthening the autonomy of residents over their rights – to public security, to education, to memory, to culture and a better urban environment for their housing. Their continuous fight has formed a network of resistance, enabled by numerous actors actively involved to engage residents and partners, which aims to guarantee the fruition of rights, producing knowledge about the territory and transforming its landscape. The network that connects residents, cultural institutions and political activists exists as an invisible, though dynamic layer that affects the built environment of Maré, much differently from the way authorities deal with the fabric of favelas.

In 2017, Maré residents were dealing with intense police operations in which houses were searched and people were arrested without legal grounds. As a response, Redes da Maré members enabled the network to promote the March Against Violence, a large peace protest running through the main street of Maré, Rua Principal, held on 24 May 2017. This paper analyses the organisation’s practice of articulação in light of this march. The Portuguese word articulaçãorefers to the ability to establish partnerships, convince different stakeholders, negotiate disputes, make collaborations that appear not structured and calculated. This paper will discuss how through articulação Redes da Maré can institutionalise discontent and public resistance to police and state violence, dealing with communal matters from below, through dialogues, encounters, correspondences. It is neither as rigid as planning, nor as unstructured as improvising and it allows members to engage with and change the space of Maré towards spatial justice. Looking at concepts of “care” (Hooks 1990, Tronto 1993, Bellacasa 2017) and “insurgent planning” (Miraftab 2009, Simone 2019, Roy 2011) this paper highlights the importance of plural epistemologies of planning. Through diagrams, quotes, images as well as videos, this paper will explore the impact of the march to illustrate the pivotal role of articulação in the production of networks of resistance.

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This paper is a proposal for an exhibition to be housed at the National Museum of Mexican Art in the city of Chicago of architect Adrian Lozano. The display will explore Adrian Lozano's life and work through the juxtaposition of Gloria Anzaldua's ‘Chicanx Consciousness’ and Michel Feher’s notion of ‘Investee Activism’. The show will examine how the Mexican-American community of Pilsen uses the investment in the built environment as an oppositional tool towards a multi-sited existence. The exhibition uses Adrian Lozano's work as an artist and architect to examine the Chicanx social movements in the Pilsen neighbourhood of Chicago through four critical moments of urban struggle since his arrival from Aguascalientes to Chicago in the late 1920s.

This paper traces the first collective movement in the late 1950s as a result of urban renewal-led displacement from Jane Addam’s legendary Hull House in Chicago, where Lozano created the first Mexican mural in the city. Secondly, it looks at the taking over of Casa Aztlan by the Brown Berets, which led to the 1968 school walkouts and the establishment of the Benito Juarez High School, Lozano's first major public commission. Thirdly, the historic 1986 Immigration Amnesty that transformed diasporic relationships for the Mexican American community and led to the opening of the National Museum of Mexican Art on March 27, 1987. It could be considered Lozano's most important work, a turning point in the community's struggle, and the site where this exhibition would take place. The paper shows how the exhibition is conceived as a way to propel the recent fight against gentrification through the emergence of the Pilsen Conservation Charter. Through the notion of “caring”, a concept described by Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher, the exhibition will use curatorial practices as a methodology to research this history through Lozano's architecture. The show will reveal these critical moments for the Chicanx community through the material remains of his life and work in order to contribute to the most recent challenge Pilsen is facing. The show is not only about the production of Chicanx’ knowledge on the built environment, but most importantly, about its translation into modes of opposition and protection.

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