The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology Contemporary Approaches to a Cross-Disciplinary Field

From Critical Distance to Critical Proximity: How Can Anthropology Inspire Different Architectural Research?
Albena Yaneva

Introduction: Critical Agendas and Contemporary Approaches to the Cross-Disciplinary Field of Architecture and Anthropology
Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Madlen Kobi and Ying Zhou

PART 1: Methods
Marie Stender and Aina Landsverk Hagen

1 Paperwork of the Everyday: Reworking Welfare State Housing with Dirt, Dogs, and All
Heidi Svenningsen Kajita

2 Relevé as a Tool for Drawing Attention: Migrant Dwellings in the Rif (Morocco)
Lisa Raport

3 On Sketch and Script: Artistic Sensibility in Urban Investigation
Davisi Boontharm

4 Comparing Fieldnotes, Converging Methodologies: Architectural and Anthropological Perspectives on Socialist-Modernist Mass Housing in New Belgrade
Dalia Dukanac and Sara Nikolić

5 Visual Narratives of Inhabitation for Interrogating Inclusion in Social Housing Renovation in Brussels
Claire Bosmans, Katja Roslevitch and Viviana d’Auria

6 Drawing Matters: Graphic Anthropologies in Architectural Education
Nelson Mota, Alejandro Campos Uribe and Agim Kërçuku

7 The “Organic” Production of Space and its Social Order
Noel A. Manzano Gómez

PART 2: Processes
Aina Landsverk Hagen and Ying Zhou

8 Of Flesh and Concrete: Autoconstruction in the Fitness Architectures and Anti-Architectures of Medellín, Colombia
David Edgar

9 The Temporalities of Demolition: Anticipation and Refusal on a London Housing Estate
Caterina Sartori

10 The Timeless Fruition of Perishable Buildings: Correspondences with the Mẽbêngôkre People
Luísa Bogossian

11 The Frustrated Need for Meaning: Situational Aesthetic Boredom and Collaborative Creativity in Everyday Architectural Competition Work
Aina Landsverk Hagen

12 Tiny Homes, Unreal Estate, and the Precarious Politics of Housing: The Case of the Wendy House
Jean Comaroff

13 Form Follows Kinship: Loneliness and Family by Design
Pedro Rodriguez-Parets and Montserrat Lamela

PART 3: Uses
Claus Bech-Danielsen and Marie Stender

14 Making a City, Reinventing Ruins: The Social Life of an Urban Infrastructure
Julia O’Donnell

15 Sharing Space and Making Home: Everyday Belonging in Multicultural and Low-income Neighbourhoods in Norway
Randi Aleksandra Narvestad, Anne Sigfrid Grønseth and Eli Støa

16 Ways of Inhabiting and Perceiving an Álvaro Siza House
Sandra Marques Pereira, Tânia Lemos, Idalina Machado and Leandro Arez

17 Can Good Fences Make Good Neighbours? Anthropological Explorations of Openness and Boundary-Making in Architecture
Marie Stender and Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne

18 From Function to Affordance: Observing Pedagogic Shifts through Use of Space in an Open-Plan School
Shunsuke Itoh

19 Blue Tin Roof: How Architecture and Social Life Reflect, Inflect, and Deflect Each Other in Nepal
Theo Hughes-Morgan

PART 4: Environments
Madlen Kobi and Claus Bech-Danielsen

20 On Polystyrene and Zebras: Integrating Ethnographic Perspectives and Architectural Innovation in Housing Retrofits
Maria Șalaru and Rokia Raslan

21 Circular Practices, Learning Processes, and Doing-It-Yourself on Japan’s Empty House Renovation Projects
Natasha Durie

22 “Nothing Goes to Waste!”: Processes of Demolition Material Reclamation in Istanbul and Beyond
Erdoğan Onur Ceritoğlu

23 Growing Spaces for at Least 100 Years: The Vegetal Politics of the Theatre of the Long Now
Indrawan Prabaharyaka and Hannes Schwertfeger

24 Dreams of “Stoffwechsel”: Matter, Evolution, and Form in Architectural Anthropology
Sascha Roesler

PART 5: Flows
Ying Zhou and Madlen Kobi

25 Volcanic Ties: Mutually Constituted Landscapes in Mexico and the United States
Sarah Lynn Lopez

26 Cementing Settler Colonialism: An Ethnography of Israeli West Bank Construction
Lies Defever

27 The Cosmopolitan Pastoral: Mobilizing Peripheries from the Village to the City and Back
Trude Renwick

28 Chinese Enclaves in Spain: Urban Transformation of Industrial Districts and the Global Economy
Marta Catalán Eraso

29 Foreign Experts and Chinese Airports
Max Hirsh

Parallel Worlds: Missed Encounters between Architecture and Anthropology
Adam Jasper

Biography

Marie Stender is an anthropologist and senior researcher in the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her research focuses on architectural anthropology, disadvantaged neighbourhoods, urban-domestic boundaries, place-making, and social sustainability. She has founded the Nordic Research Network of Architectural Anthropology and co-edited the Routledge anthology Architectural Anthropology – Exploring Lived Space (with Claus Bech-Danielsen and Aina Landsverk Hagen, 2021).

Claus Bech-Danielsen is an architect and a Professor in the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is a housing researcher working in the field between architectural space and social life. In his research he focuses on postwar mass housing and on the development of social and environmental sustainability in disadvantaged housing areas. He was chief editor at Nordic Journal of Architectural Research for a decade and co-edited the Routledge anthology Architectural Anthropology – Exploring Lived Space (with Marie Stender and Aina Landsverk Hagen, 2021).

Aina Landsverk Hagen is a Research Professor of Social Anthropology at the Oslo Metropolitan University, with a PhD on architects’ collaborative creativity. She has published extensively on youth participation in urban development, innovation, organizational change, trans-disciplinary methods and action research. She co-edited the Routledge anthologies Media Management and Digital Transformation (with Arne L. Bygdås and Stewart Clegg, 2019) and Architectural Anthropology – Exploring Lived Space (with Marie Stender and Claus Bech-Danielsen, 2021).

Madlen Kobi is a social anthropologist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research and teaching focus on architectural anthropology, waste, infrastructure, urban political ecology, circular construction, and material culture with a regional focus on China and Europe. She co-edited the anthology Coping with Urban Climates: Comparative Perspectives on Architecture and Thermal Governance (with Sascha Roesler and Lorenzo Stieger, 2022) and published her research in journals such as Visual Studies, Social Anthropology, Urban Studies, Roadsides, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and International Journal of Urban and Rural Research.

Ying Zhou is an architect and urban theorist teaching at the University of Hong Kong. Her research on the urban transformations of Shanghai, contextualizing contemporary developments in the institutional frameworks and historical legacies of the city, was published in the book Urban Loopholes: Creative Alliances of Spatial Productions in Shanghai's City Center (2017). Her current research looks at how the burgeoning of contemporary visual art spaces manifest the shifts in the arts ecologies of East Asian cities, and their intersections with heritage conservation, architectural reuse, gentrification, and the rhetorics of creative cities.

“This handbook offers a remarkable and comprehensive overview of the cutting-edge research produced at the dynamic intersection of anthropology and architecture. Each chapter is filled with compelling insights, unexpected theoretical approaches and creative methodologies, urging us to think about the profound ways in which the built environment shapes all our lives.” 

Professor Inge Daniels, Professor of Anthropology, University of Oxford.

 “As people make buildings, buildings make people. Both are enmeshed in the fluxes of a world alive with materials, bodies and dreams. In such a world, habitation and design are two sides of the same coin, as are the disciplines that practise and study them: anthropology and architecture. This landmark volume sets new standards for their collaboration.” 

Professor Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen.