Law and economy as architectural tools in the production of new urban commons.
At ALICE we study how law and economy are active producers of our everyday spaces, from the house to the territory but also symbolic and affective realms. With this line of research, we seek to analyze and critically describe both past and existing processes of this legal and economic spatial production, but also develop alternative practices capable of creatively rendering codes, scripts and protocols, as well as economical tools, from budgets to forms of distribution and contribution, into operative architectural tools in bottom-up forms of spatial configuration.
We study the historical ties between economy, the house and its administration, its modern extension to a territory turned into an infrastructural device and the spatial consequences of the naturalization of the economy. If today, nature and the economy work through each other to co-produce our environment, this is, in turn, articulated by overlapping layers of legality shaping the movements, positions and possibilities of our everyday by determining lines, zones, uses and rights. Against the most often quoted understanding of the idea of nomos – the normalization of a field, the subsequent division of zones and distribution of rights and responsibilities –, we focus on a dispositional understanding of it to produce active and adaptive spatial solutions.
Related areas of research:
– Codes, scripts and protocols: writing the nomos.
– Contributive economies.
– Economy, ecology and the interiorization of nature.
– Architectural readings of the environment/milieu notion.
– Urban densification.
– Adaptive design strategies.