DIVERGENT SPACES, AFFIRMATIVE INFRASTRUCTURES

Ed. by Elke Krasny, Sophie Lingg, Claudia Lomoschitz

2024

Abstract:

Feminist and disability theories reveal how human embodied experiences are situated – shaped by their environments, cultural contexts, and systemic oppression based on race, gender, disability, fertility, etc. In public spaces bodies can be supported, disabled, policed, or celebrated, according to their perceived (non)conformity. As such divergent bodies are more vulnerable to oppression. Against false neutrality, the agency of divergence can convert public spaces into affirmative infrastructures.

How could the built environment better serve diverse embodied needs? Could public spaces be designed more strategically to support specific human identities and in doing so create more affirmative spaces for everyone? Could practices of immersive public art and grassroots activism offer tactics for the conversion of public spaces as infrastructures that enable divergence rather than conformity to conventional norms? Architectural canons have long celebrated notions of autonomy, universality, and singularity in the design of the built environment. However, these concepts deny the multiplicity of real human bodies, identities, experiences, and individual preferences. These dynamics are political, as “the struggles of the last century were at heart about the right to be free of oppression based on the kind of body you inhabited” (Laing 2021: 305). Design practices and their built outcomes have historically relied on the idea of a standard user, from false depictions of a typical body 2) to reductive assumptions about human sensory perception. 3) Rather than expressing the inherent multiplicity of human embodiment, these narrow conventions reveal a disciplinary bias toward false standards that are typically male, white, cisgender, and normate. 4) Embraced for their utility in design, they are exclusive simplifications that negate the actual diversity of non-conforming human bodies and minds, reinforcing “the social process of making cultural otherness from the raw materials of human physical variation” (Thomson 1996: 60). As described by disability scholar and self-advocate Aimi Hamraie, “value-neutral built environments” are built from “material-discursive phenomena that mask the dominance of perceived majority identities and bodies” (Hamraie 2013: 8). Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, how could the design of affirmative infrastructures meet specific human needs by deviating from, rather than conforming to conventional norms?