In the spotlight of the contemporary news media, and in the financial sights of developers and architects, the Middle East exists in the liminal space between exemption and exception, between the desire to be connected to the global circuit, and yet anchored in the pull of historical perception. Whether it is Norman Foster’s ‘Zero Energy City’ in Masdar, or the insta-urbanism of Dubai, the technological imperative of carbon neutral design (as in Abu Dhabi) or the unrivaled speed of emergence of a city without an established historical tradition (as in Dubai),^[11] the Middle East contains extremes of urban and social life.

This part of the world is also the realm of extreme extra-territoriality; it is sometimes the result of internal conditions. Contested spaces are not always the outcome of clear protagonists and antagonists, of a population or condition affected by a discernable other. The layers are often quite complex, whether it is the luring of migrant laborers from the Indian subcontinent to Dubai to build a city they will never have access to, or Talibieh, Baqa’a or ‘Azmi al-Mufti Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan,^[12] the migrant labor camps of Sonapur in contrast with Palestinian enclaves in Israel. The antagonistic ‘other’ can be fluid, invisible. It can be as mercurial or protean as smoke.

The Middle East is also the test ground of a region that is seeking to establish a new sense of identity within the cultural and political ebb and flow of a space whose boundaries are still being negotiated. It is an ever-present reality in the news cycle and consciousness of a large percentage of the American population whose encounter with this world is forever affiliated with the image of Minoru Yamasaki’s buildings collapsing in lower Manhattan, André Agassi playing tennis atop the Burj al-Arab, Major Nidal Malik Hassan’s shooting spree at Fort Hood, the controversy over the Danish cartoons, the faceless suicide bombers blowing up pizzerias in Tel Aviv and Palestinian children throwing rocks at tanks.

These are the obvious differences. They are not the nuanced distinctions that Richard Sennett or Saskia Sassen argue for or ask us to create. The backdrops are there, New York, Dubai, Fort Hood, and the larger ‘monolithic’ Middle East; they will always be there. The proscenium is where the amateur can act, question, speculate, wonder, speak a truth to some power –regardless of how idealistic that truth might be, or how fantastic a vision it may imply. The amateur is someone who loves, and in the extra-territorial spaces of our world this must be an ethical intervention.

In defining the terms “terrain” and “territory,” the Spanish architect Manual Gausa observed that “they are strategic zones of friction,”^[13] and:

a territory is no longer a shape –or at least no longer just a shape– but also a complex system of relationships and events determined by successive, defining layers of reference (physical, demographic, biological, economic, cultural, political, etc.) and the large-scale structural networks (transport, energy, computerised diffusion, financial movements, etc.) that articulate it, among which simultaneous processes of action and reaction are unleashed. What counts is the way we intervene…^[14]

Recent research currently being explored by graduate students at the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture engage Gausa’s directive. John Steingraeber’s design of an intimate funerary space for immigrant Indian migrant workers in Dubai is contrasted with the insta-urbanism and insta-history of that city; echoed by Cormac McCarthy when he writes in The Road: “All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them”^[15] Jessie McClurg’s project envisions the re-purposing of the strata beneath the streets of New York as a support system for homeless women; Alison Markowitz questions water as a contested resource in the urban slums of Karachi; Molly Eagen is imagining the new use of material flows neglected by the United States Defense apparatus in Forward Operating Bases in Iraq. Hans-Christian Karlberg is investigating the psychological and spatial complexes at play in post-war Sarajevo. Kimmy Tanaka is studying the divided city of Nicosia, Britt Schwager is re-seeding the city of Mostar by designing a strategy that embraces placement, displacement and re-placement of architectural programs, buildings and urban trajectories along the shore of the Neretva River.

The operative strategy with these sometimes distant terrains, is, for the amateur, design. Precisely because its value lies in its power to engage those spatial spheres, however imaginal [imagined?] or remote, where meaning is produced. When faced with the very tangible and challenging provocations that populate these spheres, the question of human rights seems inevitable, what can design do to dispossession and the erosion of civil liberties? One answer is that design has the power to enable, or in the words of the great southern American architect (and winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant) Sam ‘Sambo’ Mockbee^[16] to his students: “Bring it on. Proceed and Be Bold.”^[17] Sambo’s work during his time at the Rural Studio in Hale County, Alabama, its legacy since his death, has been to empower students (‘amateurs’) to realize the critical impact they can have on their immediate community. The amateur is here someone who takes the world and its liminal spaces as their immediate community, by embracing (loving) an ethical imagination.

This is an architectural ethos, and it is what design does. It empowers the amateur to love more completely and embrace an ethic of engagement, distance is no longer an excuse for inaction. It also encourages a creative sourcing of information, data and knowledge, and turns accessibility into a challenge. It animates the creative imagination of the architect, artist, cartographer, poet and writer, proposing an inventive and powerful alchemy against normative, expected understandings of space, place and boundary.

The engagement of the amateur makes unbounded landscapes and discontinuous spaces available. They become available because we hold them up to an ethical as well as intellectual, expert and experiential lens. The  exclusivity of these spaces is therefore denied, because we see in them the human costs of extra-territoriality. The amateur’s engagement is beyond mere analysis. Design is a means to chip away at the exclusivity of these heterotopic zones. It is a creative, generous act that allows us to hold up (and more tightly to) the better angels of our natures.

Please click on the link to download and view a PDF presentation by Molly Eagen: “C.H.U.: Iraqi Refugee Housing” (PDF)

Notes:

^[1] Richard Sennett. “Urban Age: A Worldwide Investigation into the Future of Cities” , http://www.urban-age.net/10_cities/03_london/_quotes/london_overview_quotes.html, accessed October 25th, 2009.

^[2] Saskia Sassen, “Urban Age: A Worldwide Investigation into the Future of Cities” , http://www.urban-age.net/10_cities/03_london/_quotes/london_overview_quotes.html, accessed October 25th, 2009.

^[3] Michel Serres. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, p. 44-45.

^[4] Markus Miessen and Shumon Bassar, “Introduction: Did We Mean Participate or Did We Mean Something Else?” inDid Someone Say Participate: An Atlas of Spatial Practice, M.Mieseen and S. Bassar eds. Cambrige: MIT Press, 2006, p.22.

^[5] John Dewey, quoted in The World in Which We Occur: John Dewey, Pragmatist Ecology and American Ideological Writing in the 20th Century, Neil W. Browne. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007, p. 23.

^[6] I am grateful to my graduate student James Thompson and friend James Wheeler, for sharing their thoughts – and experiences – with respect to their work at the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio – and to our resultant discussions on experience and expertise.

^[7] Markus Miessen “Spatial Practices in the Margin of Opportunity?” in Did Someone Say Participate”: An Atlas of Spatial Practice, M.Mieseen and S. Bassar eds. Cambrige: MIT Press, 2006, p.287.

^[8] I am indebted to Daniel Bertrand-Monk for his participation in a symposium in April of 2008 at the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture – and also to these borrowed terms. The title of Dr. Monk’s conference keynote was titled “ Pseudo-ethics and Pluto-Politics: The Greening of Architectural Mumbo-Jumbo.”

^[9]ibid, 287-288.

^[10] ‘Draw what you see, not what you know” was the clarion call for introductory classes on representation in schoolsof architecture. A useful (ethical) parallel might be “Draw what you don’t see, so that you know.”

^[11] Dubai has built approximately 600 skyscrapers over the past decade.

^[12] In the early part of the decade, researchers from Yarmouk University in the northern Jordanian town of Irbid, counted the number of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan to total thirteen. UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency) claims there are ten.

^[13] Manual Gausa, Vicente Guallart, Willy Muller, Federico Soriano, Fernando Morales, Jose Morales, authors. “Territory” Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture. Actar: Barcelona, 2003, p. 619.

^[14]ibid, p. 621.

^[15] Cormac McCarthy. The Road. Vintage: New York, 2006, p. 74.

^[16] Mockbee died in 2001 of leukemia. He was honored posthumously by the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2004. The Rural Studio is currently being directed by Andrew Frear.

^[17] A recent example could be Cameron Sinclair’s book Design Like You Give A Damn, which documents the initiative of Architecture for Humanity, founded by Sinclair and his partner, Kate Stohr.