Lifelines: Politics, Ethics, and the Affective Economy of Inhabiting

Edited by Camillo Boano and Cristina Bianchetti

In the face of the radical convergence of a health crisis and an ecological crisis, it is not possible to return to the investigative trajectories on inhabitation and dwelling that yielded good results in the past. What is it that now defines inhabitation within the plurality of conditions, geographies, and politics that connote it? Lifelines is a work of collective research on the spaces where life intertwines, mingles, and twists in constant resistance to the mechanisms that capture, exploit, and create the social and environmental precariousness that characterizes the violent techno-capitalist present. The book investigates the roles and challenges of design in uncertain spaces and brings together empirical explorations from Italy, Ecuador, the US, Lebanon, Germany, and the UK.

Stemming from a two years collaborative research the volume investigates the roles and challenges of design in uncertain spaces and brings together empirical explorations from Italy, Ecuador, the US, Lebanon, Germany, and the UK. Lifelines are many things as the editors suggest “is a research project born in confinement […] it is carried out using a language that was negotiated in the interstices of the possible […]  It follows up on previous research, reformulating the centrality of life that was underlying but invisible […] it is modelled in the holding capacities of alliances”. While generated from the disciplines of urbanism and architecture,  In the face of the radical convergence of a health crisis and an ecological crisis, it is not possible to return to the investigative trajectories on inhabitation and dwelling that yielded good results in the past.

What is it that now defines inhabitation within the plurality of conditions, geographies, and politics that connote it? Lifelines is a work of collective research on the spaces where life intertwines, mingles, and twists in constant resistance to the mechanisms that capture, exploit, and create the social and environmental precariousness that characterizes the violent techno-capitalist present. Lifelines are a collage of different excavations on those spaces that resist abandonment and carelessness, the true generators of precariousness and exhaustion, while offering the possibility of protection “from the specter of self-destruction.”

Using the lens of infrastructures as spaces and medium, as relations and openness, each of the 17 chapters reflect on the fact that living is not a question of survival but a process of continuous adaptation between protection and freedom, between care and control; and this adaptation is a struggle, it is finding ways to escape, degrees offreedom; a struggle to transform the existing by coming to terms with vulnerabilities where “lifelines are nothing more than inhabiting the meanders of adversity, of coming to terms with life, vulnerable and collective, resisting the adversity of what is there by creating space for maneuvers, support, operations of liberty”. Edited by Camillo Boano, and Professor Cristina Bianchetti Professor of Urbanism at the Polytechnic of Turin, the book contains several contributions from UCL colleagues. Among the many, Dr. Clare Melhuish (UCL Urban Laboratory Director) wrote “Culture and heritage infrastructure as ‘lifelines’ in east London; Hanadi Samhan (DPU PhD candidate) with Hoda Mekkaoui wrote “The Beik infrastructure of loyalists: Sawfar’s fragmented lifelines”; Nadine Bekdache, and Abir Saksouk, from Public Work in Beirut and UDP alumna authored the chapter “Public Work’s Housing Monitor: digital lifelines for urban advocacy in Lebanon” and Joana Dabaj and  Ramona Abdallah from Catalytic Actions, DPU long term partner, wrote “Inhabiting Tell Serhoun: holding places operated to confront the uninhabitable”.

Published by Jovis and available online here

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