This project deals with spaces for a historically neglected collective: sex workers. It aims to destigmatize the practice by representing the workers and the material conditions that determine their safety and well-being every day, of which architecture is part. Articulated from an intersectional feminist point of view, the research evaluates how the design of these spaces has been and continues to be a technology to control the workers. At the same time, it visualizes the workers and how they construct processes of emancipation within their (legally and spatially) subjugated position. The design offers a working space that houses these emancipatory practices, in the context of the recent decriminalisation of sex work in Belgium. In order to do so, it draws from feminist and queer theories to construct an understanding of space that materializes the emancipation from the scale of the neighbourhood and urban block, until the detailing and use of material.

Tolerance is an essential tool of peaceful coexistence that allows diversity to flourish and a multicultural pluralist society to function. In times of globalisation, digitalisation, and polarization, it is becoming more critical than ever. Nevertheless, tolerance faces multiple issues. As a concept, it is being washed up, belittled, and critiqued either for its extensiveness or narrowness. Consequently, it became a vague notion, posing the question of what it means in contemporary society. Is it emotion, feeling, or attitude? How does it relate to other concepts of inclusivity and justice? In addition, even with an increasing amount of studies, there is still a gap in knowledge about the relationship between tolerance and space. It is still largely unknown how one associate with the other, what forces are affecting this link and how to use it to facilitate tolerance. Moreover, Kaunas, my hometown and choice as a case-study area, has very explicit issues regarding discriminatory but also changing attitudes, making it an optimal location to investigate (in)tolerance and conditions for it. Therefore in this paper I embark on a journey to study this concept, following the main research question: how can spatial and policy planning be used to foster more tolerant attitudes towards difference in everyday Kaunas? Tolerance is subjective, partly non-representational, and unconscious. For this reason, I chose to use a mixed-methods explorative approach, combining comprehensive theoretical and empirical analyses. I consolidated spatial observations, institutional research, in-depth unstructured interviews, extensive literature and media review, and poetic investigation of artistic mediums. Through these methods, I integrated knowledge from a diverse range of disciplines, from psychology and philosophy to urban planning and architecture. The fusion of multiple methods and disciplines allowed me to conclude on conceptual and spatial aspects of tolerance. By integrating tolerance into the affect theory, I argue that it is a process which, through encounter, transforms one state of being into another, meaning that tolerant attitudes are in constant flux. I transferred this new definition into the theoretical framework, which guided my empirical investigation in Kaunas. Based on unstructured interviews and an analysis of multiple cases, I uncovered a force affecting people’s attitudes in Lithuania – the Tolerance Event. It is a very active form of encounter that ruptures the passive status quo while at the same time addressing severe socio-cultural issues and allowing people to get to know diversity. Building on this theory, I propose multiple strategies as an example of how to use the Tolerance Event in Kaunas. They involve funding, policy, institutions, design, and planning proposals and are covered by one central vision – to become the Brave Tolerance City, Kaunas needs More Tolerance Events.

The work of Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) provides invaluable material for rethinking the built environment as a sort of inorganic spatial memory that enables the evolution of life by means other than organic life. Following Stiegler’s theoretical turn toward epiphylogenetic processes, Footprint 30 is devoted to revisiting the built environment as middling between individuating technical ensembles and niche construction processes. It offers a platform to the transdisciplinary field of posthuman scholarship dealing with existential niches from a technological angle and the concomitant architectural thought that advances such speculative recasting.@en

Desperate times demand optimistic transdisciplinary measures. This volume unites a select group of thinkers who courageously traverse disciplinary boundaries. What brings them together is the least stratified ‘component’: a shared problem. It is a widely recognised that a problem gets the solution it merits. However, only a few acknowledge that a problem seldom neatly fits within a single discipline, nor does it conform to the principle of general equivalence. Handling its irreducibility and non-entailment is a skill possessed by very few. Even fewer take the quasi-causal capacity of what we term the ‘space of technicity’ seriously. The space of technicity, the shared problem of this volume, is a consequence of immanence. Each configuration of surfaces comprising the built environment produces an intangible effect, acting as a quasi-cause. It can be referred to as downward causation or the timely rediscovery of (neo)finalism. In this volume it is approached it from the perspective of axiology. The space of technicity allows us to evade techno-determinism without adopting an anything-goes attitude. That which has become manifest could have individuated differently. However, the potential of a body cannot be discerned before intervening in the causal fabric of agential reality to extract the singular points that make certain outcomes more likely than others, surpassing mere probability. When operating within the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, where sense becomes intricately dependent on sensibility, and vice versa, the volume’s attitude might be said to approximate the Spinozian third kind of knowledge that intuits design (and its space of technicity) beyond mere imagination or reason. This edited volume was inspired by a virtual round table that exhibited a high degree of resonance among the participants. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBiBAgxC5FM@en

Desperate times demand optimistic transdisciplinary measures. This volume unites a select group of thinkers who courageously traverse disciplinary boundaries. What brings them together is the least stratified ‘component’: a shared problem. It is a widely recognised that a problem gets the solution it merits. However, only a few acknowledge that a problem seldom neatly fits within a single discipline, nor does it conform to the principle of general equivalence. Handling its irreducibility and non-entailment is a skill possessed by very few. Even fewer take the quasi-causal capacity of what we term the ‘space of technicity’ seriously. The space of technicity, the shared problem of this volume, is a consequence of immanence. Each configuration of surfaces comprising the built environment produces an intangible effect, acting as a quasi-cause. It can be referred to as downward causation or the timely rediscovery of (neo)finalism. In this volume it is approached it from the perspective of axiology. The space of technicity allows us to evade techno-determinism without adopting an anything-goes attitude. That which has become manifest could have individuated differently. However, the potential of a body cannot be discerned before intervening in the causal fabric of agential reality to extract the singular points that make certain outcomes more likely than others, surpassing mere probability. When operating within the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, where sense becomes intricately dependent on sensibility, and vice versa, the volume’s attitude might be said to approximate the Spinozian third kind of knowledge that intuits design (and its space of technicity) beyond mere imagination or reason. This edited volume was inspired by a virtual round table that exhibited a high degree of resonance among the participants. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBiBAgxC5FM@en

This issue of Footprint aims to introduce the latest developments in the field of queer theory into the realm of architecture and urban design – and vice versa, to make architectural and urban design concerns an element of queer studies.@en