CONTRAESPACIOS PÚBLICOS

PROCESOS Y MIRADAS DESDE ORIENTE

Abstract

Since the middle of the last century, the repercussions of mass-democracy processes could be intuited. The city is transformed gradually into the dangerous and insipid scenario of the post-political, which is taken as the overall framework developed in recent decades by authors such as Jacques Rancière or Slavoj Žižek. Precisely through this logic, economic structures control political and social activity, by eliminating all differences or internal conflicts through artificial consensus, contrary to what is meant by politics. When regarding new forms of urbanism, often linked to an almost military control of the population and impregnated with an exaggerated obsession with the economic potential of the city and its competitiveness in a global market, we can say that the spatialization – or even territorialization – of the post-political is no longer something we can avoid. Once again, architecture and urbanism as spatial disciplines seem to be doomed to their old role of organization instruments. In this situation, it is urgent to define a position, to identify post-political spatializations and, above all, to pay attention to possible emerging political spaces. Since the possibilities are endless, special emphasis has been placed on certain political situations in the East, as they represent a quite unknown – or perhaps still not assimilated – reality for certain areas of Western thought. This does not mean they are less revealing: on the contrary, they complete the picture we have of the world and even ourselves. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the present work looks for conclusions and ways in three cities distant to our nearest Western context – Beijing, Warsaw, Istanbul – and from different times, as by contemplating their reflection (and our own,  brought by their surfaces) it will be possible to recognize part of the “we” that often remains unknown or unnoticed for being too far. Thus, the conditions of counterspace will be explored from a political perspective, being space, and not time, the main element of concatenation.