Prefigurative Architectures:

The workshop examines the architecture and politics of urban logistics. During the pandemic, the spatialities and materialities that sustain the distribution of goods, knowledge and people, were made visible. The reproduction of everyday life has become increasingly entangled with the efficacy and reach of urban infrastructures and logistical networks. From food, to fuel; from medicine to transport links: the pandemic resurfaced and exposed the underlined patterns of inequality that shape these logistical landscapes. In this context, across Europe and South America, there were a series of initiatives driven by social movements and urban collectives that sought to put in place alternative logistical arrangements. Forms of distribution that were not driven by market logics: networks of solidarity that allowed for a fairer distribution of goods, knowledge and value. The workshop addressed the architecture of these popular logistics, and explored the spatial qualities of these networks as they entangle and articulate infrastructures and people across metropolitan terrains.

Working in groups, students how the movement, storage, and allocation of goods and bodies have unfolded into descriptive categories of how we govern urban spaces. Logistics, a discipline that moved from military circles into civil domains, is devoted to the sustainment and reproduction of practices and organizations. Urban life has become increasingly associated with the expansive arrangement of logistical networks: conduits that connect dispersed hinterlands with metropolitan fabrics.

The module investigated how the municipal scale can be transformed into a transformative political domain. Municipalism and the prefigurative responses developed by a plurality of urban collectives engaging with multiple logistical networks, allowed students to expand the remit of design and architecture in the projection of alternative patterns of production, distribution and consumption.

In order to uncover, analyse and develop logistical counter-proposals, the students deployed a plurality of methodological tactics:

1. Tracing processes: using public policy analysis, visual methods and on-line sources, students traced the actors, materialities, and infrastructures entangled in the configuration of logistical networks.
2. Visualizing logistics: students were encouraged to de-construct logistical networks, understanding the relationship between infrastructures (as platforms from where to manufacture, produce, and circulate things) and logistics (as systems, interfaces and codes to govern infrastructural networks)
3. Prefigurative interventions: students were encouraged to mobilise feasible and operable projects as a means of highlighting and overcoming processes of spatial injustice.