to create manipulations of architectural consciousness

"Today, more than ever, architecture is based on data and data visualization that can be translated into space through diagrams and other methods of representation. This quantitative and qualitative information meshed together to create manipulations of architectural consciousness. Political debates and economic discussions ignored or remain hidden mostly during these processes of design and construction to protect the profit of investors and decision makers. But those are the actual reasons for conflicts in big urban projects in between political domain, investors and people of the cities.

(...)


As Harvey (2013) mentions, this neoliberal re-programming of the city as an investment tool put its inhabitants under pressure and because of that, they fight back with urban revolts. Applied tactics during the events give us clues for new visions to re-discuss every profession involved in the creation of these urban conflicts. Architecture is one of the main professions in this picture and maybe because of that focal positioning, architects are much closer than the other professions to question radically their field of action.


During the urban revolts all around the world, as a basic human right, people started to practice the freedom to make and remake themselves and their cities (Harvey, 2013). This practice of freedom constructs itself as applied tactics against strategies of decision makers. In this new era of place making, the architect should explore new roles like usage creators, information and self-expression platform providers and memory recorders as Herkes İçin Mimarlık did. Today, in an era to reconsider all professions, streets are the places for advanced exploration of possible futures of architecture and new roles for architects."

From a paper that I presented at an academic conference.