Kring Brasa— the “Circle of Embrace” in Surinamese —is a non-profit community organization, formed by residents of Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer neighborhood, in the Southeast side of the city. Their purpose is to repair—through a focus on green development and green education—the urban wound created in their neighborhood by Highway A9. A9 was part of the modernist urban plan for Bijlmermeer, designed to connect effortlessly the residents of the area to their offices in the center of the city. Despite the visionary intentions behind the masterplan implemented in the early 70s (Fig. 1), Bijlmermeer never attracted the middle-class residents it was intended for. The high cost of the apartments and the lack of public facilities led instead to big vacancies. The municipality ended up housing Surinamese immigrants in the neighborhood, ultimately creating a ghetto. To repair some of the social inequalities that ensued, Kring Brasa has been working towards the creation of the Brasa Park on top of the A9 Highway—part of which has now been moved underground (Fig 2). The Brasa Park is meant to connect Bijlmermeer with the adjacent neighborhoods, giving residents access to a shared green area which they can develop according to their cultural and social needs. Our recent master level course, “Designing with Others,” collaborated with the community towards this future. The students designed and built a light green structure in the Brasa Park, to serve as the meeting point for the community. The course was designed in close collaboration with the community, over multiple meetings, in which hopes, aspirations, and concerns were exchanged. Recent community-design scholarship (A. Becker, et all., 2020; B. Mackay-Lyons, 2014; J. Simonsen & T. Robertson, 2013) offered an overall theoretical framework. The community was actively involved in the weekly studio meetings, following the students who investigated the area and developed their personal designs (Fig. 3). The midterms took place at a local museum, where everyone from the neighborhood was invited to see the students’ proposals and express their preferences through voting (Fig. 4). Thereupon the students worked collectively to develop one common design from the scale of the site plan to that of 1:1 built elements. For the finals, the students along with the locals, built the light-structure on Brasa Park (Fig. 5). In the process they experienced first-hand how community leaders, inhabitants, builders, local actors and local authorities are responsible for co-creating the built environment—a premise on which the course is built. This paper will begin with a presentation of Bijlmermeer’s urban history (interconnected with its international, cultural, and sociopolitical aspects), will focus on the Brasa Park and its engaged community, and will showcase the process— with its successes and shortcomings—of designing and building the light structure. Grounding the conversation on community design discourse, the paper will draw conclusions on the capacity of architectural education to prepare socially responsible designers, capable of developing and implementing tactics of care and repair in their engagement with others, addressing harsh urban realities, like segregation, in our often, broken world.

Globetrotters around the world—at least the ones who decide to do their globetrotting on land—know that they can get a pretty accurate first impression of the country they are about to enter by examining the spatial organization, architecture, and appearance of a border crossing. Willingly or not, the architecture of those places depicts in crude, bare essence the cultural and political climate of the state they belong to, its global geopolitical position, and bilateral relations with the neighboring states with which they share a border. For example, the border between Belgium, where I live, and the Netherlands, where I work, is in some places marked by a white line on floor tiles that runs through coffee shops, houses and, I assume, bedrooms (fig. 1). Two different types of light bulbs (shining in different colors) used in Berlin during the Cold War division reveal where the border-wall between East and West Germany used to be. Border lines that separate Brazil and Bolivia demonstrate cultural discrepancies, such as opposite stances toward deforestation and the preservation of nature. If architecture of a border zone can be described as “frontières plastiques: an equilibrium between social forces,” as suggested by Jacques Ancel,1 then this is best visible in the formal and spatial appearance of a border crossing. [...]

During the past five decades, the neoliberal market economy has become one of the most influential forces in the process of spatial production, transforming cities worldwide by subjecting them to the rationale of global finance. In a world where religions and ideologies continue to lose their influence, financial supremacy has turned into an adequate substitute. The global nature and overarching impact of neoliberalism has made it the research focus of a vast cohort of urban and architectural scholars, historians, theoreticians, geographers, and economists, leading to a significant body of literature that discusses the relationship between the market economy and the built environment on all scales. This “globality” of neoliberalism is recently being disputed by its widely-accepted depiction as a western phenomenon with varied local implementations. Post-socialist neoliberalism, we argue, is not an isolated occurrence but rather an extreme case that accentuates the distinct features of neoliberal spatial transformations, making its characteristics more evident and traceable. This thematic issue challenges the notion of neoliberalism as solely a post-Fordist Keynesian phenomenon, proposing a new theoretical framework that redefines the neoliberalization of the built environment as a global spectacle with diverse, yet analogous, localized expressions across various spatial scales.

This conversation with Moira Crone was inspired by her science fiction novel The Not Yet. The interview opens with a question regarding the capacity of architectural heritage to carry past and present values, as well as our stories, and help us make sense of the world. With an emphasis on the historic French quarter in New Orleans, Crone explains why the preservation of the city’s most famous neighborhood was necessary for the plot and how in reality this preservation takes place. She discusses the difficult and cruel history of plantation homes in Louisiana, as well as moments in which the strict racial hierarchies broke down, creating possibilities for different ways of co-existence among its inhabitants. Crone unpacks her ideas about archetypical architectural spaces like the theater, and the subversive role it can play in contemporary or imaginative societies. The interview concludes with a discussion about science fiction’s connections to architectural thinking and the author’s creative process.

The twentieth century has witnessed destruction of the built environment and heritage in armed conflicts on an unprecedented scale. In the intense competition for post-conflict reconstruction, cities are often drastically redefined and recalibrated to fit new or imposed political, social, cultural, and economic schemes. Yet, the war-time destruction is rarely the end of purposeful erasure of built environment. Post-war reconstructions, especially the ones that brought change of ideologies and regimes into the mixture, are equally detrimental to the architectural heritages of the past. “Transition Urbicide” discusses post-war reconstruction in post-socialist countries—here primarily focused on former Yugoslav republics—that is entangled with economic and political transition from socialism to unhinged neoliberal capitalism. This symbiosis caused thorough and arguably systematic erasure of modernist heritage of former Yugoslavia that is ongoing to this day. The main goal of this theoretical framing is to explain architectural engagements with violent transformation of urban morphology within the broader framework of urban geopolitics and post-war recovery in post-socialist societies. By doing do, it seeks to build unique architectural knowledge needed for post-conflict reconstruction in complex and conflicted urban environments.

This editorial is an introduction to the issue of Footprint 34, ‘Narrating Shared Futures’. The issue is dedicated to a transdisciplinary encounter between literature and cultural heritage, namely, here we seek to understand how literature can help us unpack complex meanings of places of heritage, and use that knowledge to imagine, design and produce shared and inclusive futures. We elaborate on three notions that appear in the title of the issue – ‘narrating’, ‘shared’ and ‘futures’ – and then we explain how each of the articles featured in this volume contributes to the proposed framing. We conclude with a brief discussion of ways in which the past, present and future are constantly being made in-the-now through both literary and design techniques.

This visual essay features students’ projects from the MSc2 design studio ‘Transdiciplinary Encounters: Narrating Shared Futures’ offered at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture in Spring of 2022, which served as an inspiration for this issue of Footprint. Designed and taught by the issue editors, Aleksandar Staničić and Angeliki Sioli, the course combined cultural heritage and literary narratives to ask students: How can places of memory be rethought using literary techniques, so that they provide the ground for new meanings to emerge and get shared across different cultures? Seven visionary architectural projects featured in this essay, offered their responses to this pertinent question that is fundamental for narrating, imagining and, ultimately, creating shared futures.

Around 1661, Johannes Vermeer painted what has become one of the most famous city views: the View of Delft. The city of Delft is depicted from across the water of the River Schie. We see the city as a collection of brick buildings with lower and higher towers, peaking into the sky, and being reflected in the water of the river. The light looks alive: despite the clouds it is bright, setting the buildings of Delft and the riverbank in the foreground in a palpable warmth. Delft, an intermediate European city in the province of South Holland, between The Hague and Rotterdam, has featured quite prominently in Dutch city narratives, partially thanks to Vermeer’s paintings, which showed fragments of both spatial and social characteristics of the city in the sev-enteenth century. In the same period, biologist Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek experimented with lenses and built a microscope, which led to the discovery of the micro-world of cells and bacteria. The city’s small streets, the canals, the church towers and the market squares still remind us of the times of Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek. But Delft today, as a centre of trade, knowl-edge and art, is a very vibrant city, with the University of Technology as one of its most celebrated contemporary inhabitants. The TU Delft is recog-nized around the world for educating progressive thinkers and innovators in varied engineering fields, while its Faculty of Architecture has raised, and keeps raising, inspired generations of architects and designers. As Delft is the city where this Writing Urban Place network originated, and where many members of the network have lived, studied or lectured, or are still doing all the above, we have asked our Delft-related colleagues for their views on Delft, painting for our readers, in words, their accounts of the sociospatial characteristics of this city, their relationship with the water, their favourite urban places, their personal Views of Delft.

The article reflects the city of Skopje from the perspective of the workshop Skopje Brutalist Trail held in late September 2022 as a part of the activities focused on fieldwork within the COST Action Writing Urban Places. The workshop departs from the general topics of brutalist architecture and solidarity, both highly relevant and related to the city and its culture. The idea of the workshop is to offer a new viewpoint by means of civic participation and activism in order to reassess forms of solidarity in the process of community building. The workshop engages creative writing and performing arts to develop urban narratives that link architectural legacy, in-situ findings and memories of people and places, juxtaposing past, present and future narratives.

This Repository is the result of over three years of intense collaboration of Working Group 3 of our COST Action Writing Urban Places. The repository gathers a series of methods and assignments born from a shared interest in urban narratives. What can narratives tell us about how communities relate to place? How can existing stories of place allow us to write new narratives for the city? How can we read the stories that are inscribed in streets, on walls, and in architectural details? How can archives unveil hidden stories of places and buildings, and of their makers and users? How can we write the city by using our senses?

This Repository can be seen as an invitation, encouraging scholars, students, and spatial practitioners to explore 49 methods, and, through clearly laid out assignments, take them out into the field. We want this Repository to be a practical tool, an open document, and a living device. In it, each method is described in a short text and is accompanied by an assignment. The assignments are a central element of this Repository, as they interpret, complete, or continue the methods themselves, but also encourage a constant dialogue between contributors and users, through a series of experiments and practices within the urban space. Each assignment is presented as a clear set of numbered instructions to guide the reader to explore and employ the method.

This Repository came to fruition thanks to an intense collective effort bringing together almost as many different voices as the set of methods it gathers. This Repository celebrates this proliferation, multiplicity and cohabitation of thoughts and visions and thus gathers a series of innovative and creative procedures deriving from different horizons in order to expose the diversity in which the city might be grasped, told, and expressed and thereby also produced. It intends to stimulate new approaches in architecture, urban studies, and other fields of spatial development and to invite creative, often embodied, and sometimes playful engagements with the material and immaterial dimensions of urban places.

This issue of Writingplace Journal moves into the field, exploring the moment when reflection turns into action, and questions how knowledge produced via research is appraised and applied on the ground. In the articles, authors reflect upon their concrete experiences where insights regarding the city and its narratives have been made operational. Understanding the urban as a complex expression of social, historical, material, spatial and temporal relations between people and their built environment, we argue that this comprehension of places demands and envisions action, by which active and transformative processes take place in the real world. Fieldwork is in this sense both research and event, both investigative process and performative project.

The works of artist and preservation architect Jorge Otero-Pailos on experimental preservation provoke deep reflections about some of the fundamental questions dealing with heritage: temporality of objects, changeability of inscribed cultural values, the greater purpose of architectural preservation as a cultural practice, and the societal role of an architect and preservationist in formulating narratives around heritage. As the artistic installations featured in this visual essay — The Ethics of Dust (2014–2016) and Watershed Moment (2020) — demonstrate, Jorge Otero-Pailos combines various elusive elements, such as water sounds and dust, to conceive meditative and contemplative spaces. His installations invite visitors to pause and reflect on the memories, both personal, social, and environmental, that define each of us; they probe deep into the past and deep into the future.

Since these are some of the issues we wanted to explore in this special issue, ‘Embodiment and Meaning-making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Heritage Architecture’, we invited various artists and scholars to write a very short caption in reaction to the images provided by the author through one of these three ‘lenses’:

- affect, embodied experience, atmosphere;

- politics of heritage;

- processes of meaning-making.

The results reveal the power of images to provoke imagination through atmospheric and embodied experiences, and the power of experimental heritage work to convey (political) meaning across distance and different analogue or digital media.

This visual essay includes contributions from (in order of appearance): Tenna Doktor Olsen Tvedebrink, Federico De Matteis, Michael Hirschbichler, Jovana Popić, Maria De Piedade Ferreira, Uta Pottgiesser, Marcus Weisen and Brady Wagoner, with an epilogue from Jorge Otero-Pailos.

In this interview article, we present a unique marriage of architecture heritage design and fundamental philosophy exemplified in the built works by Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF), a studio that works at the intersection of visual art, experimental architecture, and philosophy based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The conversation with Prix de Rome laureate Ronald Rietveld and Socrates Professor in Philosophy Erik Rietveld took place during the field visit to three RAAAF’s projects — Bunker 599 (2013), Deltawerk // (2018), and Still Life (2019) — where we examine the potential of affordance-based approach for rethinking and creating built heritage as (re)activation of past, present, and future.

This article introduces the special issue — ‘Embodiment and Meaning-making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Heritage Architecture’ — which aims to incite a dialogue across different disciplinary approaches to understanding how heritage architecture is experienced, registered, and produced. Here, heritage architecture is investigated by taking an interdisciplinary lens to questions of meaning-making, place, memory, and culture. The article explores how these are shaped at the intersection of spatial design, human embodiment, and modes of cultural production. First, it situates the special issue’s theme by introducing the notions of affect, atmosphere, embodiment, affordances, and politics of meaning-making. This positioning comes through an overview of the three influential yet still separate strands of scholarship — affective and more-than-representational approaches to heritage; the politics and agency in meaning-making in places of memory; and the emerging embodied and experiential turn in architectural scholarship driven by the knowledge from embodied cognitive science. The second part outlines the special issue contributions and explores the common threads in how collected papers have addressed the relationship between embodiment, meaning-making, and political agency in the context of heritage architecture. Finally, in this introductory article, we discuss the emerging perspectives and research agenda for interdisciplinary investigations on how heritage architecture is produced, registered, and experienced.

The past few decades have witnessed destruction of the modern architecture and heritage, especially in post-socialist countries torn by various active or passive conflicts, on an unprecedented scale. In former Yugoslavia, for example, the damaged modernist architecture fell into a vortex of ideological and semantic battles, hasty privatizations, biased media coverage, and the deeply polarized public opinion — all of which caused for some buildings to remain in ruinous state up until today. The distinctive symptoms of this process — contested ownership, private takeover of communal resources and unbridled investment plans — reflect in the urban sphere through appropriation of public spaces, erasure of historical architectural styles, or even failure to produce (re)construction at all. Failing to understand and address these phenomena may lead to irreparable devastation of modern architecture that has already been severely damaged in an act of calculated violence. Complex investigation into modalities in which transitional processes influence the transformation of cities requires new methods of documenting and cross-referencing multiple architectural sources and histories. My paper will focus on the dual methodology I implement in my research: documentation of big data sets collected through a digital web-platform, and development of “semantic data models,” designed to expose hidden relationships between different actors that participate in the transformation and destruction of modernist heritage. The main objectives of this research project are (1) to develop new research scenarios for management and interpretation of the big collections of architectural documents, (2) to expand the value of modern architecture to broader circles of the society, especially to general people other than the experts in architecture, and (3) to re-examine existing and develop new interdisciplinary protocols whose goal is to impede the continued destruction of modern architecture.