Category Archives: territoriology

cover-excerpt

A New Index for Public Space

(with Tali Hatuka)

9781032555836

Out in April 2025 – Now announced at : https://www.routledge.com/A-New-Index-for-Public-Space-After-Distancing/Hatuka-Brighenti/p/book/9781032555836

With three generous endorsements from:

 

“This erudite and provocative book melds social and political theory with design thinking to produce a new set of terms to understand both the nature and the phenomenology of publicness. Inspired by the challenges of physical distancing that accompanied the global pandemic, the authors show the durability of the public realm while offering new ways to interpret and produce a range of disordered, agonistic, and spatially-situated interactions that will continue to make public spaces the lifeblood of cities.”

Diane E. Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Harvard Graduate School of Design

*

“How can we talk about public space and make sense of its continuous mutations in contemporary cities? As the authors suggest, we need to explore patterns of experience and affect along with efforts to conceptualize sociospatial crises. This book is an inventive and highly successful experiment in analyzing publicness that offers to city dwellers and planners alike an index of terms to be used in thinking about city life as a multifarious set of realities and possibilities.”

Stavros Stavrides, Professor of Architectural Design and Theory, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens

*

“Triggered by the contemporary challenges and appreciation of the post-pandemic future of urban space the authors continue the quest to understand and assess public space. Through a new index they introduce us to a series of fresh and inspiring methods and prompts that traverse disciplinary boundaries and help explore the experiential and phenomenological dimensions of public space. The book is a welcome addition that introduces researchers, teachers, and students in the built environment and social science disciplines to innovative ways of examining the future of public space and eventually to show new ways to “read” the city.”

Vikas Mehta, Fruth/Gemini Chair, Ohio Eminent Scholar of Urban/Environmental Design, and Professor of Urban Design, University of Cincinnati

 

Zone

Tu es seul le matin va venir
Les laitiers font tinter leurs bidons dans les rues

La nuit s’eloigne ainsi qu’une belle Métive
C’est Ferdine la fausse ou Léa 1′attentive

Et tu bois cet alcool brulant comme ta vie
Ta vie que tu bois comme une eau-de-vie

Tu marches vers Auteuil tu veux aller chez toi à pied
Dormir parmi tes fetiches d’Océanie et de Guinée
ils sont des Christ d’une autre forme et d’une autre croyance
Ce sont les Christ inférieurs des obscures ésperances

Adieu Adieu

Soleil cou coupé

 

Apollinaire, Alcools (1913)

 

Public Space and the Study of Urban Territories

An online seminar to be given  on Thursday 07 December 2023 Time: 12:30-13:30 (UTC+00:00 – Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London.)

Abstract:         

In this lecture, Professor Brighenti seeks to introduce territoriology as a research approach and a sensitivity that can be applied to the study of public space. He explores the intersection between social theory, ethnography, human geography and design as helpful to study territorial productions in the making. Each territory is shaped by imaginational and figurational forces of social life as they get incorporated into a set of materials. Starting from this assumption, he would like to illustrate a few cases and possible applications in the field of urban studies.

To get the Zoom link, pls contact ARCHI Research <ARCHI-research@cardiff.ac.uk>

Animated Lands – Q&A

https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/blog/2022/03/07/andrea-mubi-brighenti-and-mattias-karrholm-animated-lands/
How did your book come together?

Animated Lands is a book that encompasses different case studies, but they are all strongly integrated into a single research programme. We got to know each other over a decade ago, and soon started collaborating around our shared interest for understanding social-spatial phenomena. We have since been organising seminars, attending conferences, lecturing together, and paying research visits to each other to bring the project to completion. We have not started from a single theory, a paradigm, or anything of that sort, but mostly from passion, as well as from an expanding curiosity for the topics we were stumbling upon along the way. A number of themes started resonating, took speed, and at some point we felt the book was just ripe.

What’s the central claim?

Over time, we increasingly realised that, in urban and architectural studies, territory – or if you want, more simply, land – was an underrated notion, yet one with a lot of potential. So we picked up an old word, ‘territoriology,’ and tried to use it in a new sense. Seeking to retrieve and revive a science that was born under positivistic auspices, and dealt with politically charged phenomena, we thought that we also needed to warn the reader against the possible regressive uses of these notions, and how easy it is to get trapped into a certain worldview. That’s why we have striven to promote a different take on the life of territories – what they are about, what they accomplish. To counter gloomy and regressive views, we sought to foreground aspects of vitality, spontaneity and unpredictability that are ever-present in territory-making.

What is your favorite book? Why?

We do not have a favourite book in the absolute sense, but there are some books to which it is always a pleasure to return to. One is, inevitably, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. It’s a book that’s impossible to read from start to finish, simply because it is itself unfinished, and made only of fragments. Together with all the other urban essays by Benjamin (including masterpieces such as Berlin Childhood around 1900), returning to Arcades never fails to provide fresh inspiration, intuitions and emotions. It’s more than cultural theory and urban history – to our minds it is actually sustained, fully accomplished territoriology.

What book would you recommend right now?

The list could be quite long! We are constantly looking for inspiration across the domains of literature, philosophy, the humanities, as well as social and life sciences. But for one, Bruce Chatwin’s short-prose collections What Am I Doing Here? and Anatomy of Restlessness are colourful, charming explorations into how territorial life generates its own inherent deterritorialistions. Chatwin’s forays into what he called ‘the nomadic alternative’ encompass, stories, encounters, documentations, self-analyses… ‘Why – he famously asked – do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two? (I am, I admit, a bad case.)’ Questions like this one are the sort of powerful, provocative questions we like to engage with.

What’s next?

…more territoriology! Animated Lands is, above all, an invitation. Rather than launches and presentations, we envisage to put the book directly to use in practical workshops, where participants could experiment their own way into inquiring territories. Most rewarding for us would be to learn that some other scholars and readers are similarly using our book this way, as a possible blueprint for carrying out further fresh research into the many facets of social-spatial life.

 

9781032051666

Territories, Environments, Politics: Explorations in Territoriology

Our new Edited Collection now announced :

Territories, Environments, Politics
Explorations in Territoriology

Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti Mattias Kärrholm
forthcoming in April 2022
9781032051666

Table of Contents

 

Introduction: The stake of territories

Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm

1. The state of territory under globalization: Empire and the politics of reterritorialization

Stuart Elden

2. How the non-human turn challenges the social sciences: The case of environmental struggles at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France

Sylvaine Bulle

3. Commercial drones and the territorialisation of the air: Towards an aero-volumetric understanding of power and territory

Francisco Klauser

4. Inhabiting together: Manure contracts and other territorial compositions between pastoralism and agriculture in Western Burkina Faso

Alexis Gonin

5. Territory glimpsed through Lache Eyes: A tale of non-Euclidean and symbolically authentic excursions in liminal space

Les Roberts

6. Affirmatively reading deterritorialisation in urban space: An Aotearoa/New Zealand perspective 

Manfredo Manfredini

7. Rendering territory (in)visible: Approaching urban struggles through a socio-territorial lens

Anke Schwarz and Monika Streule

8. The territorialisation of the grocery shopper: Eco-ethical asceticism and environmental nostalgia

Mattias Kärrholm and Anna Petersson

9. The territories of music in public space: Scenes from Warsaw and Lisbon

Cláudia Casquilho, Pedro Gonçalves, Caio Mourão, Paula Nunes and Daniel Paiva

10. Passage territories: Reconstructing the domestic spatiality of an Indonesian urban kampung

Kristanti Dewi Paramita

11. Dodging rocks and baseball bats: Stories of territory, tourism and trespassing in Detroit neighborhoods

Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy