Paper short abstract:

Examining Garnier's An Industrial City (1901) and Bogdanov's Red Star (1908), this paper explores socialist utopian visions of ideal cities and their infrastructures. Despite emancipatory projections, the legacy of these once-utopian projects now manifests as contemporary ecological dystopias.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout the twentieth century, plans for mass utopia reflected and actively shaped the spatial expectations of the modern subject (Buck-Morss, 2000). This paper focuses on socialist utopianism at the turn of the century by discussing processes of infrastructure construction and their environmental and colonial projections found in two case studies, architect Tony Garnier’s An Industrial City (1901-1917) and polymath Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908).

In 1901, Garnier planned a model city for 35,000 inhabitants, which the architect anticipated would be repeated throughout France and possibly beyond in colonial territories. The utopianism of the project expected that technological progress, industrialization, and railway development would solve colonial violence to attain world peace. Conversely, Bogdanov published a science-fiction novel, Red Star, in 1908. In this book, the protagonist, Leonid, travels through an industrial socialist civilization on Mars with its gargantuan canal infrastructures. Through Leonid’s travels, Bogdanov explains his idea of an industrial socialist utopia, the expected result of a socialist revolution (Stites, 1984).

In the works analyzed, the authors imagined a prosperous future society. However, the historical transitions and transformations of the twentieth century proved otherwise. Today, the built legacies of 20th-century industrial utopian projects, such as large-scale infrastructure, suburbia, and skyscrapers, have become our contemporary ecological dystopias. Keeping this sharp contrast in mind, we elaborate on the possibilities and limits of utopian emancipation through the built environment.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork on renovation in the Baltics, and citizen and stakeholder workshops on the decarbonization of housing, I juxtapose five temporal contestations where histories of building maintenance, price changes, climate perception, sufficiency, and ageing frame the affordances of renovation.

Paper long abstract:

The affordances of refurbishing and transforming buildings depend on a variety of temporal concerns related to situated social, political, and technological imaginaries and materialities. While the European Renovation Wave has challenged the state of unrenovated buildings as detrimental to chances of reducing the significant climate impact of the housing sector, everyday struggles of renovation draw on broader temporal contingencies. Juxtaposing data from fieldwork on building renovation in the Baltics, citizen and stakeholder workshops on decarbonization of housing in lifestyles compatible with limiting climate change to 1,5 °C, and involvement in housing-climate policy development processes, in this paper I explore the interaction between five forms of how temporal contestations ground local imaginaries of building transitions: (1) climate policy against affordable housing development; (2) infrastructural decay against technological and investment return calculations; (3) construction inflation periods against governmental support schemes; (4) expectations towards living area per person after experiences of overpopulation against proposals of return-to sharing; (5) ageing and long-term against short-term sufficiency. The paper is located within a context of economic, governance and technological struggles towards renovation in Latvia where rates of renovation of ageing housing stock are low which is increasingly narrated as of critical importance if not a situation of ‘crisis’. In this context, changing technologies and systems of building maintenance responsibility, expectations towards changing construction and housing prices, ageing of both housing and people, and divergent understandings of climate change make temporal concerns at the forefront of renovation decisions.

Paper short abstract:

The material deconstruction of buildings has profound social meanings, one of which connects the material coarseness to the difficulties of socialist life. The harder the demolishing goes, the stronger the remembrance it provokes, eventually rearticulating the time-space to head to the past.

Paper long abstract:

This paper illustrates how the roughness of architectural remains provokes socialist memories and points the temporality to the past. In this case, fragile building materials and boorish texture and appearance represent the hardships of socialist life, and brutal deformation corresponds to the fading of the era, directing the temporality it exhales backwards. My fieldwork site is located in a herding territory in northwest China, where massive state-led excavation in the 1950s left factories, huts, and railways, and building work in this undeveloped region has cost arduous labour and even blood and lives. Though not directly involved, local herders' understanding of the place has been profoundly reshaped by chilling memories of watching train tunnels built by hammers in hands and clods-made huts erected halfway up a cliff. Their knowing of the grassland where everyday herding life happens, whose physical tracks on earth were humble, was eroded, confronting the brutally-looking constructions exhaling the grandeur of collectivism and the historical affliction it contains. Since 2006 when herders have been moved from the pastureland to urbanized settlements, the geographic separation therefore ruptures the time-space of the land, anchored by the remaining architectural entities, from that of the modern settlements which are constantly renovated. The land whereafter ceased as a living habitus and was completely crystalized to be a museum of desolation and roughness of socialist life recorded by the remains of the buildings.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores loitering, as mediated by built environments, in its capacity to act as an anchor (albeit transient) to a specific site for immigrant gig workers; making visible their significance in maintaining the city’s rhythm while acting in opposition to their various temporal lags.

Paper long abstract:

Delivery riders provide mobile and temporal labour that maintains the rhythm of cities (Sharma, 2014). Platform work creates spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of congregation for their largely immigrant working class workforce (van Doorn & Vijay, 2021; Kitchin, 2019), determining how riders congregate and loiter on sidewalks and intersections.

I explore such mediations of loitering, congregation and waiting in their capacity to reveal alternate relationships to time. I draw from queer and trans theory to discuss temporal lags, interregnums and waiting as non-linear understandings of temporality, futures, aspirations and normative adulthood (Malatino, 2019; Freeman, 2010; Halberstam, 2005). Using this as an opening, I show how immigrant gig workers exist in temporal lags – between time zones, aspirations, and waiting to become ideal workers, consumers, and citizens.

This paper is a work-in-progress and a component of my dissertation where I place feminist geographies, materialist media studies, and queer and trans theory in conversation to explore how the built environment, through a focus on loitering, mediates relationships to non-linear temporalities. As a way of inhabiting space, loitering fosters a relationship with the built environment where risk, anonymity, and movement are constantly negotiated (Phadke, Khan & Ranade, 2011). I explore loitering, as mediated by built environments and technological structures, in its capacity to act as an anchor (albeit transient) to a specific site for immigrant gig workers; making visible their significance in maintaining the city’s rhythm while acting in opposition to their various temporal lags.