Articles by Francesco Pasta
Lo Squaderno, 2021
This brief essay discusses the relation between resilience and the periphery, exploring how the w... more This brief essay discusses the relation between resilience and the periphery, exploring how the widespread narrative on urban resilience, and its associated interventions, impact metropolitan peripheries in the so-called Global South. More specifically, the paper examines how the construction of urban resilience is operationalized and contested by both governmental actors, civil society, and local communities across three South-East Asian urban centres: Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila. In these expanding risk-prone megacities, urban vulnerability is exacerbated by climate change and poses increasingly relevant challenges, disproportionately affecting urban poor informal communities. Within this context the discourse over resilience, far from being just a technical issue, intertwines with political questions of socio-spatial justice and is often deployed in selective and biased ways, to justify slum clearance and the displacement of the urban poor. There are, however, innovative examples of community-based practices which contest this narrative, by advocating for their right to be considered a legitimate part of the city and to play an active role in its socioecological system. These examples indicate other possible routes towards urban resilience.
Lo Squaderno, 2021
This brief essay discusses the relation between resilience and the periphery, exploring how the w... more This brief essay discusses the relation between resilience and the periphery, exploring how the widespread narrative on urban resilience, and its associated interventions, impact metropolitan peripheries in the so called Global South. More specifically, the paper examines how the construction of urban resilience is operationalized and contested by both governmental actors, civil society, and local communities across three South-East Asian urban centres: Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila. In these expanding risk-prone megacities, urban vulnerability is exacerbated by climate change and poses increasingly relevant challenges, disproportionately affecting urban poor informal communities. Within this context the discourse over resilience, far from being just a technical issue, intertwines with political questions of socio-spatial justice and is often deployed in selective and biased ways, to justify slum clearance and the displacement of the urban poor. There are, however, innovative examples of community-based practices which contest this narrative, by advocating for their right to be considered a legitimate part of the city and to play an active role in its socioecological system. These examples indicate other possible routes towards urban resilience.
Bangkok. On Transformation and Urbanism, 2016
With its emphasis on the collective, open character of the design process, community architecture... more With its emphasis on the collective, open character of the design process, community architecture practice has been challenging the methodological tenets and disciplinary boundaries of architecture, shifting the focus from a merely physical output towards a remaking of sociopolitical relations, knowledge production and transmission, people’s capacity and self-organization. Community architecture is, in short, about the practical reformulating interaction between the terms that make up the concept: community and architecture.
When practicing community architecture we are positioning ourselves, as individuals and kind-of-architects, alongside a social construct we refer to as “community”. Such concept is subject to various actual interpretations: as community architects we may find ourselves engaging with overlapping entities, at times in friction, that share a common physical space and are all, one way or another, the community.
This emerges well in an ancient, stratified and heterogeneous locality such as Nangloeng, a community in central Bangkok where I have been working for some time as part of community architecture group Openspace. This brief account aims to provide some cues for reflection on the actual meanings of “community” on the ground, and the role community architects can play bridging across such meanings.
Quest'articolo esamina il ruolo della città nel processo di costruzione dell'identità collettiva,... more Quest'articolo esamina il ruolo della città nel processo di costruzione dell'identità collettiva, in particolare analizzando come lo spazio urbano-nella sua produzione, esperienza, rappresentazione, appropriazione e reinterpretazione-rappresenti una componente fondamentale dei processi di negoziazione identitaria attraverso cui una società avanza ed evolve. L'analisi è incentrata sulla città di Diyarbakır, nell'Anatolia sudorientale, capitale informale del Kurdistan, dove lo stato turco e l'identità ufficiale da esso promossa si scontrano con movimenti sociali che si oppongono al discorso egemonico riproponendosi come curdi.
Journal Issues by Francesco Pasta
lo Squaderno, 2021
lo Squaderno no. 60 – November 2021 | Climate Turn
Papers by Francesco Pasta
Firenze University Press eBooks, 2022
The historical development of Istanbul’s gecekondu areas (informally-originated
neighborhoods) c... more The historical development of Istanbul’s gecekondu areas (informally-originated
neighborhoods) can be broadly interpreted as a progression toward the center
and subsequent re-peripheralization, both in sociopolitical terms and in actual
urban geography. While Istanbul emerged in recent decades as a magnet for
transnational migrants and for capitals pouring into the debt-fueled real estate
sector, many such neighborhoods have been targeted by speculative sociospatial restructuring projects, while also absorbing much of the migratory
influx. The recent economic crisis plunged these urban redevelopment sites
into a deadlock, generating a fragmented urbanscape in which multiple layers
of uncertainty, suspension, and informalization overlap and interact. This
chapter explores the unfolding transformation in Fikirtepe, the largest ongoing
redevelopment project in the city, which has seen its social and urban fabric torn
apart by the redevelopment and is currently stuck in an unstable but protracted
limbo. As Fikirtepe becomes “unlivable” for many of its long-time dwellers,
a number of migrants are moving in, etching out a living: a collateral effect of
redevelopment failure, creating a space of opportunity for new disenfranchised
populations with varied backgrounds, legal statuses, and life trajectories. Within
this setting, this chapter analyzes the periphery as a condition that is articulated,
reproduced, and transformed through embodied practices. With their practices,
narratives, and trajectories, those who inhabit such botched urban transformation
embody different layers of the periphery, contributing to shape an understanding
of it as a perspectival condition with a polyvalent spatiality and temporality.
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Articles by Francesco Pasta
When practicing community architecture we are positioning ourselves, as individuals and kind-of-architects, alongside a social construct we refer to as “community”. Such concept is subject to various actual interpretations: as community architects we may find ourselves engaging with overlapping entities, at times in friction, that share a common physical space and are all, one way or another, the community.
This emerges well in an ancient, stratified and heterogeneous locality such as Nangloeng, a community in central Bangkok where I have been working for some time as part of community architecture group Openspace. This brief account aims to provide some cues for reflection on the actual meanings of “community” on the ground, and the role community architects can play bridging across such meanings.
Journal Issues by Francesco Pasta
Papers by Francesco Pasta
neighborhoods) can be broadly interpreted as a progression toward the center
and subsequent re-peripheralization, both in sociopolitical terms and in actual
urban geography. While Istanbul emerged in recent decades as a magnet for
transnational migrants and for capitals pouring into the debt-fueled real estate
sector, many such neighborhoods have been targeted by speculative sociospatial restructuring projects, while also absorbing much of the migratory
influx. The recent economic crisis plunged these urban redevelopment sites
into a deadlock, generating a fragmented urbanscape in which multiple layers
of uncertainty, suspension, and informalization overlap and interact. This
chapter explores the unfolding transformation in Fikirtepe, the largest ongoing
redevelopment project in the city, which has seen its social and urban fabric torn
apart by the redevelopment and is currently stuck in an unstable but protracted
limbo. As Fikirtepe becomes “unlivable” for many of its long-time dwellers,
a number of migrants are moving in, etching out a living: a collateral effect of
redevelopment failure, creating a space of opportunity for new disenfranchised
populations with varied backgrounds, legal statuses, and life trajectories. Within
this setting, this chapter analyzes the periphery as a condition that is articulated,
reproduced, and transformed through embodied practices. With their practices,
narratives, and trajectories, those who inhabit such botched urban transformation
embody different layers of the periphery, contributing to shape an understanding
of it as a perspectival condition with a polyvalent spatiality and temporality.
When practicing community architecture we are positioning ourselves, as individuals and kind-of-architects, alongside a social construct we refer to as “community”. Such concept is subject to various actual interpretations: as community architects we may find ourselves engaging with overlapping entities, at times in friction, that share a common physical space and are all, one way or another, the community.
This emerges well in an ancient, stratified and heterogeneous locality such as Nangloeng, a community in central Bangkok where I have been working for some time as part of community architecture group Openspace. This brief account aims to provide some cues for reflection on the actual meanings of “community” on the ground, and the role community architects can play bridging across such meanings.
neighborhoods) can be broadly interpreted as a progression toward the center
and subsequent re-peripheralization, both in sociopolitical terms and in actual
urban geography. While Istanbul emerged in recent decades as a magnet for
transnational migrants and for capitals pouring into the debt-fueled real estate
sector, many such neighborhoods have been targeted by speculative sociospatial restructuring projects, while also absorbing much of the migratory
influx. The recent economic crisis plunged these urban redevelopment sites
into a deadlock, generating a fragmented urbanscape in which multiple layers
of uncertainty, suspension, and informalization overlap and interact. This
chapter explores the unfolding transformation in Fikirtepe, the largest ongoing
redevelopment project in the city, which has seen its social and urban fabric torn
apart by the redevelopment and is currently stuck in an unstable but protracted
limbo. As Fikirtepe becomes “unlivable” for many of its long-time dwellers,
a number of migrants are moving in, etching out a living: a collateral effect of
redevelopment failure, creating a space of opportunity for new disenfranchised
populations with varied backgrounds, legal statuses, and life trajectories. Within
this setting, this chapter analyzes the periphery as a condition that is articulated,
reproduced, and transformed through embodied practices. With their practices,
narratives, and trajectories, those who inhabit such botched urban transformation
embody different layers of the periphery, contributing to shape an understanding
of it as a perspectival condition with a polyvalent spatiality and temporality.