Situated Collective Utopias: Stories of engaged spatial practices and shared territorial heritage

• Main Author: Ros, Miguel
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Arkitekthögskolan vid Umeå universitet 2015
• Subjects: performance; utopias; heritage; interventions; making; telling
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-108601

Challenging the wide-spread hopelessness in relationship to our capacity to produce real alternatives to the abstract and egoistic neoliberal utopia – with its destructive and unfair consequences around the globe in general and specifically in Mallorca – this thesis, understood as performative research, focuses on the conception and development of Situated Collective Utopias.  These would be utopias that can grow generously and unfold not as abstract and consensed projections of futures but as extrusions of very contextual and often dissensual hopes. They are apparatuses to explore our collective abilities to practically, critically and ethically engage in and sustain the making and thinking of difference. A difference that is materialized and shared as a common heritage and that belongs to who cares and takes care of it.  This thesis report contains a theoretical reflection about the concepts of utopia and heritage as well as an ecology of interventions that make and transform their own sites and aim at developing skilled spatial practices that “think through making”. The practical engagements in those particular situations afford an ongoing radical critique of their contexts and several “outside” moments of reflection.  At last, in the active pursue of finding already present Situated Collective Utopias, this thesis also tells various stories of learning from within the radical sharing community of excluded people of Can Gazà, stories which tell about a process of being given through architecting.