The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
Whether active or passive, protesting is a spatial act. Public squares may be designed to proclaim the power of a ruler, a state, religious bodies, the military – or increasingly, corporate institutions. But they are also the stages on which those powers are confronted, with the conglomeration of bodies, with collective demands, with the toppling of statues. Perhaps more than the square, key infrastructure – roads, railways, the internet – are powerful sites of resistance, the disabling of which makes protesters’ demands impossible to ignore. This reading list focuses on the ways in which collective action intersects with the built environment across the world, from the roads of Delhi to the colonial statues in Martinique.
Register for free to read today and receive the AR Reading List straight to your inbox. Happy reading!
Cooking as protest on the roads of Delhi, AR January 2022, Sarova Zaidi
‘How do you slow a highway down? With work, labour, protest, and with the slow cooking of food'
Umbrella urbanism: Hong Kong protests, AR October 2014, John Lin
‘Hong Kong is not really a city of the street; there is not much street available in the first place’
Decolonising Martinique: acts of resistance in France’s overseas territories, AR June 2022, Françoise Vergès
‘These activists are denouncing a relationship of colonial dependence that persists to this day’
Typology: Public square, AR March 2017, Tom Wilkinson
‘Squares are multivocal and, although they vary in quality, their character ultimately lies in their blankness’
Outrage: Student movement from the margins to the heart of power, AR May 2019, Lesley Lokko
‘By bringing the protest from the edges to the heart of power, the students were able to shift the entrenched axes of democracy’
Squatting the city: on developing alternatives to mainstream forms of urban regeneration, AR July/August 2017, Alexander Vasudevan
‘It is better to squat and mend than to own and destroy’
Outrage: subversive sleep, AR April 2020, Ruth Noack
‘The history of sleep-strikes and sleep-demonstrations has yet to be written, but it is alive around the globe’
Subscribe today to join the conversation and help support independent critical architectural writing. Digital subscriptions are available and all our content is available online, anywhere in the world
