Prefigurative Architectures:

The workshop examined the architecture and politics of urban logistics. It explored how recent municipalist experiments in the North West sought to contest the socio-spatial implications generated by a form of logistical urbanization that is increasing geographical fragmentation and urban inequalities. The students investigated the multiplication and spread of specific infrastructural typologies associated with the logistical turn and analyzed the set of responses put forward by urban collectives and public agencies in order to invent other forms of municipal logistics.

Logistics, often understood as the organisation and management of the circulation of goods and services, is not only accelerating patterns of extractivist development: it is also transforming the geography of metropolitan areas. It connects, mines, fields, and industrial parks, with processing and distributing plants, altering the use of urban peripheries and spreading novel architectural typologies.

Against this backdrop of urban systems governed by speed and circulation, a new wave of municipal experiments is seeking to reconfigure the purpose of logistics and promote the invention and construction of logistical commons. From Barcelona, to Cleveland; From Rosario to Preston, there are a plurality of initiatives that seek to construct public platforms and forms of distribution that are not exclusively governed by profit.

This workshop problematized the relationship between logistics and municipalism. It challenged the remit and potentiality of architecture and design practices in the articulation of more egalitarian and just cities. We looked at how we can visualize the workings of procurement and distribution practices. How common infrastructures and spaces can inform a different organization of production and exchange.