1The need to pose alternatives to consolidated positions and develop a new structuring of the field has cyclically emerged in the history of architecture and planning, often in coincidence with major socio-economic crises. In contrast to the turn toward a disciplinary interior and the search for autonomy that arose as a tendency within architectural practices (Zaera-Polo, 2016), in the last two decades a group of practices has emerged working outside what was perceived as mainstream (Schneider and Till, 2008a, 2008b), questioning the role of architects and planners (Awan et al., 2011; Petrescu et al., 2009) to address what Blundell Jones et al. (2005) describe as the vast gap between what is planned, designed, and produced and what is needed. Restructuring traditional hierarchies in the design process (Chiappero, 2017), and re-connecting architects and planners to the political debate and to the architectural object itself (Awan et al., 2011; Menu, 2018; Zaera-Polo, 2016), this new socially-engaged design culture, namely architect groups and collectives (Darrieus, 2014), operates through self-construction, temporary structures, opportunistic occupation of spaces, and the practice of residence to foster citizen involvement in the transformation processes of the city and to create self-managed situations (Chiappero, 2017).
2The existing literature about this growing body of new professional realities that challenge disciplinary borders and rules (Guadalupi, 2019) often associates the phenomenon, here named architects’ groups and collectives, with the concept of alternative (Awan et al., 2011; Guadalupi, 2019; Petrescu et al., 2009; Schneider and Till, 2008b, 2008a), yet they decide to stay vague and not explicitly describe such alternativeness, not willing to define the norm, the core of architectural practice to which the explored practices oppose (Awan et al., 2011). Somehow differently, Menu (2018), in his research ‘The Bedford Tapes”, suggests the emergence of a movement that produces alternative models and economies and embodies a paradigm shift. In Kuhn’s definition (1962), a paradigm shift is a radical change in the way normal sciences interpret reality; once a series of anomalies emerge, the profession needs to build up a new basis, new commitments and new modes of action.
3Clearly the practice of architect groups and collective refers to a long tradition in the planning debate, calling for more process-oriented forms of planning (Healey, 1997), and to the radical practice of architect groups of the sixties and seventies, such as Archigram or Archizoom (Awan et al., 2011). Also, architects’ groups and collectives neither represent a unique form of reaction nor were they omnipresent in the architectural debate and the media: Faulconbridge and McNeil, for example, suggest that some elitist buildings also make ‘statements’ resisting dominant cultures in the city (2010). Despite that, they are considered a growing phenomenon that should be better examined to understand a supposed paradigm shift.
4On those premises, this paper seeks to critically discuss the shift that architects’ groups and collectives represent in architecture and urban planning using the concept of alternative to explore the “swampy lowlands” (Schön, 1992: 54) of professional practice and its negotiation with contingency. Questioning if the practice of architects’ groups and collectives is an alternative, and to what, this bibliographic essay explores the existing scientific literature, articles and project descriptions published in architectural magazines, first describing the critical context in which the need of posing alternatives in architecture and planning has emerged. Secondly, a definition of architects’ groups and collectives will be proposed to clarify and limit the object of the research and to underline its main characteristics. Thirdly, the relation between the production of alternatives in architecture and planning practice and architects’ collectives will be critically discussed focusing on existing conceptualization and definitions of alternative. When necessary, examples and references to real projects are provided, those that have been explored through the mentioned existing literature and published articles in architectural magazines. Conclusions will drive reflections on the role of contingency in architectural and planning practices that aim to be transformative and react to present, challenging conditions. Moreover, being the essay a critical review of the existing analysis on architects’ groups and collectives, the conclusions will also suggest a framework for future – empirical – investigation, which could cover one of the evident limits of the conclusions: to explore real-world cases would help in grounding the findings of the article, abandoning abstract concepts and concretely describing the diverse economies and alternative spaces produced.
5The concept of alternative usually emerges if compared to something else, in a binary bound with what constitutes the norm or the mainstream (Awan et al., 2011). This section explores why, according to existing literature in architecture and urban planning, alternatives have emerged, yet it seems relevant to quickly define the concept of alternative.
6In the field of economic geography, the concept alternative refers to the emergence of diverse economies, defined as a heterogeneous mix of spaces and practices, forms of labour, ownership and remuneration (Gibson-Graham, 2008; Gritzas and Kavoulakos, 2015; Healy, 2009). Even acknowledging the existence of a vast spectrum of possibilities and criticalities (an overview on the concept of alternative is provided in Gritzas and Kavoulakos, 2015), the debate regards the dichotomy alternative - capitalism. However, the contemporary debate does not refer to capitalism as the only hegemony against which alternatives are produced (Fisker et al., 2018), and there is a refusal of any binary thinking to include a certain degree of pragmatism (Gibson-Graham and Miller, 2013; Phillips and Jeanes, 2018). The first implies that alternatives are produced in opposition to other contingent hegemonies, which pervade contemporary cities (such as patriarchy and racism), and thus, referring to Haraway’s work (2003), alternative can be defined as any significant otherness that becomes politically significant. The second, the refusal of binary thinking, means to acknowledge the existence of a broad spectrum of positions: in between alternative and mainstream there is alterity (Jonas, 2013), dynamic, not fixed in time and space, contingent in itself. While the concept of alterity is, for now, left apart and will be discussed later, here it is important to focus on the first element: the definition of alternatives not only relates to capitalism, but to diverse criticalities and challenges that contemporary societies are experiencing.
7In the architectural debate, the existing literature does not define what the norm, the disciplinary core might be, and, thus, little explores the concept of alternative. Yet scholars have pointed at recurrent anomalies (Kuhn, 1962) which demand new commitments and new basis for practice (Awan et al., 2011; Blundell Jones et al., 2005; Ernesti, 2016; Petrescu et al., 2009; Schneider and Till, 2008a, 2008b). Summing up the crucial elements that emerge trough those researches, the criticalities lay in (i) the relations between institutions, experts and common people, as much as (ii) a growing disconnection between public administrations, architects/planners and citizens, and (iii) between the designer and the objects they produce. In other words, the gap between what is planned, designed and produced, and what is needed, identified by Blundell Jones et al. (2005), and, thus, the need to pose alternatives in architectural and urban planning practice, relates to two diverse dynamics, which the literature identifies as the citizens’ exclusion from the planning and design process, and the growing commodification of urban spaces and architecture.
8The first dynamic evidently relates to the issue of participation. Participation in architecture and planning can be described as a process intended to bridge the gap between users and the (urban) space they inhabit, engaging them with its production. It is also aimed at opening up a critical debate, fostering dialogue to solve conflicts; participation has the potential not only to redirect urban policies, plans and projects but also to criticize and redirect architectural (and planning) culture (Blundell Jones et al., 2005). In the attempt to bridge such a gap, the recurrent questions in urban studies are: when should citizens be included in the design, planning or decision-making process? How should the growing distance in how the world is needed and how it is designed be filled? (ibid.).
9Acknowledging that the way public administration has applied participation till now has led to questionable outcomes and to a general disbelief in the possibility that participatory process can be effective (Foster and Iaione, 2016). It seems relevant to focus, once again, on process planning, considered as an opposition to authoritarian planning. While the latter is an authoritarian act that produces a fixed project, process planning defines the objectives through recurrent interactions and a cyclical approach, designing with the users, and proceeding through hypothesis (De Carlo, 2005: 15). Research exploring the emergence of a new generation of practitioners, critically questioning how participation has declined in contemporary societies and the role that architects and planners assume within the production of spaces, interrogating their own values system, point at a growing political re-engagement of the discipline (Awan et al., 2011; Gandolfi, 2008; Menu, 2018; Miessen, 2017; Schneider and Till, 2008b, 2008a): those emerging practitioners, here named architects’ groups and collectives, show a renewed connection with society and use their competences not to propose fixed solutions but to stimulate a critical debate (Awan et al., 2011; Holub and Hohenbüchler, 2015; Miessen, 2017). While how this happens will be described in the next section, here it is important to underline that according to the existing literature the political re-engagement of the architect, in contrast to the turn toward a disciplinary interior and the search for autonomy signed by the return to a “historically constructed and historically determined discipline”(Zaera-Polo, 2016: 267), is an attempt to bridge the gap between the users, the architect and the architectural object (Menu, 2018; Zaera-Polo, 2016). It not only produces alternatives against authoritarian planning and traditional hierarchies, but also against the commodification of urban spaces and architecture.
10The notion of commodification of urban spaces refers to the fact that cities built under the current socio-economic model can be described as spaces in which profit-driven urbanization overcome the needs of who will inhabit them (Brenner et al., 2012).
At stake, more generally, is the process by which urban space as such is exploited. The entire space is sold – including the people living in it, as well as the social resources and the economic effects produced by them. Urban life itself is implicated in the economic process of valorisation and is thereby transformed (Schmid, 2012: 65).
11This process that affects cities also has consequences on architecture and on how practitioners work, mainly to produce what the market demands, “rendering single-authored creative gestures as a form of economy” (Miessen, 2017: 29). Commodification of architecture means that, while only a few spectacular projects and star-architects occupy the media space, most architectural designs served as a means to promote commercial/economic goals and profit-driven urbanization, detaching architectural outcomes from their users as much as their designers (Frampton, 2005; Ponzini, 2014).
12To react against the commodification of architecture, and the incapability to include citizens in decision-making processes, other ways of doing architecture and urban planning (Awan et al., 2011) have emerged in the last twenty years. Have they proposed an alternative to those conditions? How? This section will briefly define what architects’ groups and collectives are and what they do, to enlighten diverse positions and possible contradictions. The description moves from the exploration of the specific approach to urban design – focusing on the implication on participation and the commodification of architecture- to identify two key elements: first, quickly mentioned before, the production of arenas for debate; secondly, the production of urban commons. Those two peculiarities in the approach to urban projects proposed by architects’ groups and collectives emerge as significant shifts in the way architects and planners act and in the role they choose, yet the existence of diverse positions and the fragility of these professional realities need to be underlined to understand shades in the alternativeness and the relevance of personal agendas.
13Herein, it is important to underline that the word collectives does not refer to any juridical subjectivity or organizational form. It is related to a philosophy of action: their main activity is the collective practice of architecture and urban design that integrates the users not only in the design phase but also in construction (Darrieus, 2014).
14Architects’ collectives (ibid.) have been identified in architectural magazines as a growing phenomenon in urbanism, architecture and design: a new generation of European practitioners working through small scale projects to enhance social relations within cities and, by doing so, claiming for a reconsideration of design’s social value in a changing world (Gadanho, 2011; Galilee, 2012; Higgins, 2015). The definition is blurry and sometimes ambivalent, but commonly indicates those groups, mainly involving architects, urban designers, planners and artists whose practice is characterised by self-construction, temporary structures, opportunistic occupation of spaces, and the practice of residence (Chiappero, 2017). They build small-scale temporary installations; those structures, as much as the self-building act and the practice of inhabiting and animating the installations with a cultural programme (i.e. the practice of residence), support the citizens’ engagement and produce self-managed spaces. Examples are Assembly, a London-based group that won the Turner prize in 2015 (Galilee, 2012; Higgins, 2015; Moore, 2014, 2015), or French groups such as Bruit du Frigo, Collectif etc., and Atelier Coloco (Capasso, 2013; Chiappero, 2017; Darrieus, 2014).
15The hands-on approach, a building bug originated by the need to move away from laptops, desks and rooms (Galilee, 2012; Higgins, 2015), is interpreted by existing scientific literature as a subversion of city-making hierarchies, since the production of spaces happens with and for the communities, focusing on their necessities (Bertoni, 2015; Chiappero, 2017). Also, the hands-on approach is understood as a means to re-engage with the materiality of space, and reacts to its commodification defying the distance between the architect’s and the builder’s practice (Zaera-Polo, 2016): it mobilizes social consciousness and re-engages the architectural object with the community, resisting to the reduction of architecture to a rentable commodity and to the commodification of urban spaces (Menu, 2018; Zaera-Polo, 2016).
16The self-produced architectures and the diverse uses that practitioners experiment with citizens by inhabiting them with a cultural program represent counter-devices of estrangement to provoke collective meetings and generate new narratives (Chiappero, 2017). Such counter-devices represent arenas for debate, in which material interventions and other engagement tactics are not necessarily meant to produce a permanent change in physical space, instead they are often meant to start and sustain a discussion. Emblematic is the example of the Urban Parliament, a project developed worldwide by the Spanish group Zuloark: literally the project consisted in the setting up of small parliaments where people could discuss needs and draft an Urban Rights Chart (Aßmann et al., 2017).
17Reversing the idea that physical transformations solve a specific problem, architectural devices raise questions (Awan et al., 2011; Miessen, 2017), defining uses, spaces and functions through interaction and a cyclical approach, as in De Carlo’s process planning (2005). In projects such as the Floating University Berlin in 2018 (raumlaborberlin et al., 2019), where a rainwater retention basin was turned into an experimental laboratory that continuously changed according to needs and actors, people are not given a solution for how they want a space to be, instead they are asked to experiment different forms of living and acting collectively (ibid.).
18In this sense, those arenas for debate represent commons (Menu, 2018): urban encompassed, non-appropriable spaces, a resource for public life and realm, beyond the definition of public and private (Klein, 2001).
19In brief, the concept of ‘commons’ lies in the strong bond between a good/space and the community that uses it: a commons allows public life, nurturing the community; the community governs it in common, defining together rules for using it (Manzini, 2018). The use of a good becomes central, referring to a post-Marxist critique of political economy which has cyclically emerged in urban and cultural studies (Rankin, 2012). Related to concepts of use value and exchange value, commoning represents a way to replace rivalry of consumption with subtractabilitiy of use (Obeng-Odoom, 2016; Ostrom, 2010). According to Menu (2018), architects’ groups and collectives (Menu mentions Assemble, Ateliermob, Georges, Practice Architecture, REAL, Raumlabor, StudioBASAR, Studio Miessen, We Made That) focus on the experimental use of shared spaces and on collective necessities and declare the necessity to act for non-market spaces, for shared civic spaces. According to Menu (ibid.), emerging European practices are producing alternatives to neoliberal policies and the commodification of architecture and public spaces by developing a collective social agenda, contrasting the decline of the role of states and the accumulation of capital through individual ownership, producing new types of public goods.
20Despite that:
21Economies on which the examined practices rely are still very fragile, connected to the individual’s resources. There is no single answer to the question of how to sustain their independence in the long term, although each of the presented projects gains resources and funding from very different sources (ibid.). They range from more traditional public funding to the production of diverse economies (Gibson-Graham, 2008; Gritzas and Kavoulakos, 2015; Healy, 2009).
22According to Bader (in Kemper, 2018), individual resources relate to personal agendas: i.e. the necessities that individuals have, according to how they choose to live their own private lives.
23Despite the relevance that citizens’ inclusion in the design and building process often assumes in practice by architects’ groups and collectives, this label includes a vast spectrum of groups, positions and contrasting nuances. As the projects are very diverse in terms of scale, founders and formalization levels, the aims, objectives and the relations with institutions often change and adapt.
24Regarding this second element, it seems particularly interesting to note that even the issue of “participation” can be discussed and interpreted in different ways. Menu (2018) reports a quote by Delorme, one of the founders of ateliergeorge. When asked how the studio has been able to stick to the initial concept and not be disrupted by collaboration, participation, and related consensual attitudes, Delorme answers back:
We are not asking them the big questions. We discuss only specific topics. We were selected by the city for our project and we are defending our project. So we are not compromising the big picture but only sharing questions linked to the main ambition. We explained to the people that we were chosen by the politicians that they elected. […] Citizens have to acknowledge that they gave power to certain elected bodies to make decision for them about broader policies and the built environment (Delorme in Menu, 2017: 54).
25If the position expressed by Chiappero (2017), and generally by many collectives, often seems radical or anarchist, this suggests a more moderate position, or perhaps a broader spectrum of alternatives and positions on the issue of participation.
26Till here, the approach and the aims of architects’ collectives have been described, pointing at the production of arenas for debate (Chiappero 2017) and of urban commons (Menu, 2018) as specific elements that produce diverse economies. Diverse in the sense proposed by Gibson-Graham(2008): heterogeneous mix of spaces and practices, forms of labour, ownership and remuneration. Such an approach emerges as a significant shift in the way architects and planners act and in the role they choose, yet the existence of nuances and the fragility of these professional realities need to be underlined to understand shades in the alternativeness and the relevance of personal agendas.
27Internal contradictions also emerge relating the production of self-built spaces to the aesthetic they are often associated with: a ‘politics of cheapness’ that criticizes the spectacular neo-capitalist excess (Zaera-Polo, 2016). Critiques of this specific aesthetic associated with the use of pallets or raw materials focus on the idea that austerity policies and the contraction of public investments in contemporary cities could be an opportunity for creativity to emerge, arguing that the creative impulse produced by the scarcity of resources represents a (not so new) form of labour-power exploited by capitalism (Aureli, 2013a, 2013b). As the tendency toward a poor, raw aesthetic has continued beyond the crisis as the expression of a fashionable discontent, its minimalism could be considered the epitome of the commodification of architecture with the pretence of economy (Zaera-Polo, 2016).
28Such an interpretation unveils a strong contradiction internal to the work and the practice of architects’ groups and collectives. It challenges the understanding of their work as an alternative to the commodification of architecture and urban spaces and so questions the alternativeness of architects’ groups and collectives in relation to capitalism, even more in the acknowledgement that the 2008 crisis and general disbelief in politics, together with the globalisation of labour and increasing competition, provided the background for the practices at stake in this research (Menu, 2018). Yet beyond the crisis, those practices, their approach and their aesthetic have not disappeared (Zaera-Polo, 2016).
29Nevertheless, the existence of nuances, degrees of alternativeness, and the need to overcome bipolar oppositions, are confirmed going back to the definition of alternative in relation to capitalism in the field of economic geography.
30The main references assumed here are the definitions of capitalism, alternative capitalism and alternative to capitalism developed by Rogers (2014). Similar distinctions are however proposed by other authors (Gibson-Graham, 2010; Gritzas and Kavoulakos, 2015). According to Rogers (2014) “capitalism is a system that organizes the production, distribution and exchange of goods, on the basis of private property, with a view to realizing profit and therefore increasing wealth” (ibid: 3). ‘Alternative capitalism’ is “a system where the capitalistic relationship between state and market is regulated but not fundamentally reformed, in order to try to produce optimal social and economic outcomes” (ibid.: 3). Finally, ‘alternative to capitalism’ does not focus on pecuniary gain: it is based on “collective or community property rights, rather than individual property rights, alt ought the form, and extent of collective and community property rights may vary” (ibid.: 3). An anti-capitalist is an individual who pursues alternatives to capitalism “by attempting to influence the state, taking control of the state, or actions taken independently or outside the state” (ibidem: 3).
31In Rogers’ work, capitalism displays intrinsic tendencies toward crises that make an alternative to capitalism desirable. Moreover, he states that capitalism is produced through social interaction and so can be remade or resisted only through social action and that alternatives to capitalism can only be thought and produced within a process that can be continuously questioned, made and remade. Compared to the work of architects’ collectives, the act of working together, collectively, and the suggestion to work on the process rather than on a fixed solution or form, seems to acquire a necessary relevance.
32Opposing the idea that architects’ groups and collectives represent an alternative to capitalism, and even more the understanding of the crisis as an opportunity that forces architects to be more creative (Ascher et al., 2014; Dipal, 2013; Till, 2014; Tonkiss, 2013), Aureli (2013a, 2013b) explicitly points out that by stressing on the scarcity of resources, the resourcefulness of the creative subject and the potentials of the economic crisis, those practitioners fail their original mission and only sustain the reproduction of capitalism.
33In short, Aureli questions if these new practices are addressing a paradigm shift or only confirming and sublimating the effects of the crisis and builds interesting parallelism with Walter Benjamin’s work and life. In the end, he sharply criticizes a process into which the aestheticizing self-help living conditions of, for example, squatters, normalize the precariousness, even idolising it in the name of creativity. Recalling Benjamin’s Destructive Character, written in 1931, Aureli (2013b) accuses the new generation of austerity architects of reiterating the reformist syndrome, preserving social and political conditions as they are, and advocates for “the act of making space” (ibid.: 126) by stopping to create something. Only after this stoppage, could something become truly different.
34Yet the contemporary debate refutes the understanding of alternatives as mere opposition to capitalism (Amin et al., 2003; Gritzas and Kavoulakos, 2015; Jonas, 2010; Samers, 2005; Schreven et al., 2008), as in short, the main risk is to simplify and naively interpret alternatives as ‘good’, denying the possibility that alternatives might be as exploitative as capitalism, and not be transformative. The already mentioned refusal of binary oppositions (Fisker et al., 2018; Gibson-Graham and Miller, 2013; Phillips and Jeanes, 2018) results in the concept of alterity, a condition in which dynamic solutions, not fixed in time and space, are put in action to cope with reality (Jonas, 2013). Thus, if Aureli (2013b), according to Rogers’ definitions (2014), represents architects’ collectives as an ‘alternative capitalism’, the concept of alterity, in which the distinction alternative-capitalism, or, more generally, alternative-mainstream, collapses, suggests that the practice, the aims, and the radicality of architects’ groups and collectives might be dynamic, not fixed, related to contingency and personal agendas, which Bader (in Kemper, 2018) describes as individual choices and necessities which drive practitioners.
35In this work, an emerging phenomenon, architects’ groups and collectives, has been described questioning its radicality and the change it proposes in the way architectural and planning practices traditionally operate. The new socially-engaged generation of practitioners that uses self-construction, temporary structures, opportunistic occupation of spaces, and the practice of residence to foster citizen involvement in the transformation processes of the city and to create self-managed situations has been discussed, underlining that, according to some authors, they could represent a diverse mode of conceiving urban transformations and architectural practice, while other authors critically examine their alternativeness, even arguing that they still perpetuate the same system of relationship between state and market.
36There is neither a unique position those groups express nor the agreement that their approach represents a paradigm shift. Moreover, reality is full of contradictions that nourish the approach proposed by architects’ groups and collectives; sometimes the practitioners examined in this essay even embody those contradictions, as suggested by the paradox of the independence proposed by Capasso (2013) referring to De Cauter. The paradox is based on the assumption that any individual or institution, within a neoliberal context, is an enterprise; paradoxically the more independent we are (both from the state and market dynamics) the more we need to function as an enterprise, and we start thinking like a business dependent on the market and its logic. In this perspective, the only way to stay independent from it would be to access public funding, which would also be a paradox since those funds also depend on market dynamics internal to the politics. The only way to stay independent would then be to be poor, not earning anything; but it would also mean not being able to do anything, with no power to act, but also not being able to eat (Capasso, 2013).
37Thus the concept of alterity, suggesting the relevance of a dynamic and not fixed position between the poles alternative - mainstream, implies recognizing that personal agendas and survival needs also count, and any binary/bipolar category, useful to categorize but hard to be found in reality, should not constitute an element for judgment, allowing the existence of grey zones and different possible interpretations.
38Further research should look at how architect collectives are changing the professional practice of architecture and planning, focusing on disciplinary knowledge and organizational structures through empirical and qualitative research, providing contextualized descriptions and interpretations. Also a historical perspective could be added in future research to understand architect groups and collectives both in relation to their roots and references in architecture, and in relation to their evolution before, during and after the 2008 crisis; this would allow further considerations on the future evolution of architect groups and collectives.
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