Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The world is on fire, and our walls do not shelter us. As an architect confronted by the crises of architectural futures, I turn to the spaces of science fiction (sf), those who imagine alongside us. Like Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay I find critical companions in sf CoFutures, these narratives ‘of solidarities for possible futures'. This article is impelled by one such fiction, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M-Archive (2018), to address architecture's complicity in injustice and iniquity, and is guided by sf narratives that depict alternative futures of common space, from Harry Josephine Giles’ Deep Wheel Orcadia (2021), M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi's Everything for Everyone (2022), Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994), to Becky Chamber's Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018). These imagined worlds are held alongside spatial theory, architectural practice, and acts of collaborative making to consider the commons as a site of collective possibility. In 2023, these fictions were shared in two public workshops, written onto pieces of fabric alongside scholarly works and personal experiences, which were then combined to create a patchwork quilt. This quilt is both source and method for this article, an act of collective making used to explore the commons as place and practice. Similarly, each of the article's four sections draws together fiction, making, theory, and practice to address interlinked aspects of the commons, from acts of commoning, common land, commoner, to commonwealth. Throughout, it extols the possibility of sf as a site of collective action, potent and present, through which we might imagine and construct architectural CoFutures.
Source: The Journal of Architecture
Author: Amy Brookes
Institution: University of Reading
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: University of Warwick
OpenAlex ID: W4416867951
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