Urban Struggles & Emergent Commoning Practices

August 15. 2018 (7:30 pm)

We are very excited to have Yelta Köm with us to discuss urban struggles and emergent commoning practices in relation to the #occupygezi architecture project that was initiated by Istanbul based Herkes için Mimarlık (Architecture for All).
What is the architecture of emergent situations? How do we establish our commons during resistance events and occupations? What can architects do? How do they respond?

The camp that was set up in 2013, during the Occupation of the Gezi Park, stood as an example of common space, and it signified a collective architecture, impossible to pre-plan or design. The objects, which were participants’ responses in a time of crisis, exhibited a case of temporary resistance architecture. The shift in the modernist production paradigm was materialized by designs made without professional designers and structures erected without architects: everything was produced in situ and responded to the current situation.

This architecture, without architects, displayed potentials that can emerge when the professional realm is transgressed. Resistance architecture is not the predetermined outcome of a planned process; it is the process. Istanbul based Herkes için Mimarlık (Architecture for All), which was born out of this process, initiated the #occupygezi architecture project with the belief that there was plenty to learn from these temporary structures. The project collated an architectural documentation of occupation architecture; aiming to form a collective memory of architecture without architects, while, at the same time, using the tools of architecture to create a new representation.

The presentation will try to draw a historic timeline, without romanticism or transcending the past, to explore new definitions of architecture and beyond.

Yelta Köm practices at the intersections of art, architecture and research. He graduated from the Städelschule Architecture Class and, currently, lives and produces in Berlin. He is one of the co-founders of Architecture for All, based in Istanbul. www.yeltakom.info

Herkes İçin Mimarlık – HiM (Architecture for All), (2011, İstanbul); is a platform where student volunteers and professionals can come together and bring social problems encountered in the country and the world in a creative way to the agenda, raise awareness about these problems and act to produce solutions from the fields of architecture and design. In urban and rural areas, it wants to increase the awareness of architecture in society by encouraging participatory mechanisms that are lacking in the design, planning and construction processes of the projects.http://herkesicinmimarlik.org/en/