Blue

Malkit Shoshan

Description

The book is part of FAST’s ongoing activism, research, design, and advocacy work. It builds on earlier presentations, including the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions for the Dutch Pavilion of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. 

At the intersection of architecture, urban planning, international relations and activism, BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions seeks not only to change UN missions but also to open up and expand the operative realm of architecture. It combines research and projects involving policymakers, military engineers and officers, anthropologists, local inhabitants, activists, rebels, diplomats and ministers, architects and planners. BLUE offers examples of how entrenched institutional bureaucracies can be confronted by using more inclusive models of engagement, and it shows how designs rooted in local cultures and empowerment can address a history of violence.

Sujets

• security design
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Actar D
• Date de parution: 19 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781638400721
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 21 Mo

Extrait

The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions MALKIT SHOSHAN


Actar Publishers





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13 UN peacekeeping missions
Countries contributing uniformed personnel: 121
Personnel: 95,110
Budget 2020: US$6.5 billion
UN presence in 207 cities, towns, and rural areas
with over 540 sites including various camps and super camps, airfields, headquarters, and logistics centers.




MINUSMA


*UNMIL


UNAMID


UNISFA


UNMISS


MONUSCO


MINUSCA


MINURSO


UNMIK


UNIFIL


UNFICYP


UNMOGIP


UNDOF


UNTSO










UN Peacekeeping Missions 2020




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As of 2020, United Nations peacekeeping missions were taking place in 13 coun- tries. Their material footprints cover large territories, with a physical presence in over 150 African cities and rural areas. These missions are deployed in some of the world’s most impoverished areas, where issues of perpetual armed violence, extraction and dispossession, and extreme climate conditions converge. Their spatiality is deeply embedded in the legacy and history of modernity and the nation-state—its institutions, bureaucracy, and governance structure. Since 2000, with the end of the Cold War and the beginning of globalization, the impact and footprint of peacekeeping missions have grown markedly. Their expansion can be linked to global processes of militarization, financing, and procurement methods dependent on centralized and ever-growing global supply chains.
In the past decade, I have researched the UN missions’ impact on cities and communities in conflict-affected regions. I began this work in 2007 after visiting Kosovo and witnessing the United Nations’ massive presence in cities. The extensive material footprint of UN missions raised many questions about their legitimacy, their legacy, and the capacity of their architecture to contribute to or sustain peaceful environments. This long journey, which began with a spatial and even design-related question, developed into a lengthy inquiry into the powers that operate in the background of spatial production. This project inevitably expanded to include other disciplines and assembled partners in the fields of international relations, policy, economics, the social sciences, anthropology, human rights, military engineering, and environmental studies. In the process, architecture and design tools became the vehicles for highlighting the connections between these fields and how they are being consolidated, materialized, and synthesized in space. The experience as a whole demonstrates the need for designers to rethink how design, architecture, and urban planning tools can be used for research, advocacy, and empowerment, and contribute to social, political, and cultural change.
With our think-tank FAST: Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory, working on the margins of architecture with values and priorities that reach far beyond material form, we discovered a new space for connecting with the world. As we navigated scales, complexities, and different institutional realities, we realized that we could become agents of change. We amplified progressive voices within existing institutions with the aim of shifting the status quo. The most effective tool was the ability to make connections and uncover the entanglement between financial, political, social, and cultural mechanisms and the production of space—the built and lived environments. We began tracing the associations between words in policy documents, procurement methods, and spatial production, highlighting issues of equity, institutional responsibility, and accountability. As we deployed this multi-scalar and cross-disciplinary approach, we explored how to intervene in these relationships and contingencies to produce space through words as well as through formal design: influencing policies and institutional processes to help liberate resources, empower marginalized communities, and contribute to a more just society.





MINUSMA


*UNMIL


UNAMID


UNISFA


UNMISS


MONUSCO


MINUSCA


MINURSO


UNMIK


UNIFIL


UNFICYP


UNMOGIP


UNDOF


UNTSO












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Design Activism
BLUE is not just a research and design project; it is an experiment with activism. It is an unsolicited project that emerged after a visit to Kosovo, where compounds, camps, logistic hubs, headquarters, checkpoints, and all sorts of physical installations were built swiftly under the auspices of a UN peace mission, reaching a point where they began to dominate the local landscape. This material presence raised many questions: How do these foreign missions impact the local population? Who designs them? For whom? Who pays for them? How are they procured and maintained? Is the local population involved? If so, how? What will be left behind after the missions are gone?
These questions expanded into the need to situate international peace missions within broader historical, cultural, social, economic, and political con- texts. This level of complexity required, among other things, rethinking the opera- tive field of architecture not as a privately commissioned task but as a public service—encompassing research, advocacy, and activist practices. How do we claim the knowledge produced by architecture and design and their specific representation formats as agents and tools for activism? What kind of strategies, tactics, and actions can be used to intervene in political processes to instigate change? These questions led to an ongoing exercise in challenging hegemonic powers and visions through a set of accumulated actions that operate in multiple spaces simultaneously.
Striving to contribute to social, political, or cultural change is a noble goal, but it is also an extremely complex and slow process. This project started in 2007 as an open-ended exploration. The exploration of the subject of UN missions has coincided throughout with design experimentation rooted in activism.
Research in Public
Where to begin? The visit to Kosovo was the jumping-off point for a long journey of exploration, improvisation, and intervention. The inquiry had no clear institu- tional support, target group, or audience, and it had no defined relationship with one discipline or another. The reality in which peace missions take place and their spatial manifestations are notably invisible to people who are not directly impacted by them. The subject is under researched. Information is mostly classified, and sites are restricted. The geographical areas in which peace operations take place are hard to reach because of security concerns, remoteness, and lack of infrastructure such as roads and airports. Information on present and past missions is mostly restricted, protected, and unavailable to the general public.
In “Becoming Research,” Irit Rogoff discusses the meaning of research today:
It allows a small amount of agency within a world whose rampant neo- liberal drives have taken away both agency and the ability to actually argue points in terms of content and substance. The shift from someone who expresses themselves individually to the position of being a researcher is a shift in which one doesn’t simply acquaintance or protest against but allows oneself to get involved with the workings of institutions, of pro- tocols, of memory, and of community—not in compliance, or defiance, but in efforts to rewrite these through their very working. 1


1 Rogoff, Irit. 2018. “Becoming Research” in: Choi Jina and Helen Jungyeon Ku, eds. The Curatorial in Parallax. Seoul, Republic of Korea: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, pp. 39–52.




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This research, too, had to operate in all these realms, outside the neoliberal logic and contingent on institutions, protocols, memory, and community.
This new project had to be realized on multiple fronts to create alliances and partnerships that could permit access to information, institutions, and communities. Building on my previous projects in the field of architecture, politics, and activism (such as Atlas of the Conflict , One Land Two Systems , Recon- struction of Memory , and Zoo ) I approached local academic and cultural institu- tions in the Netherlands: TU Delft, the Creative Industries Fund, and Het Nieuwe Instituut to help hosting these inquiries. It took a couple of years to consolidate a platform from which this research could be launched. I curated a series of public events and conversations at the intersection of design, activism, and security studies under the title “Drones and Honeycombs,” with the intention of breaking down the research into three areas: 1. Drones, in re