What If … or Toward a Progressive Understanding of Socially Engaged Architecture

Abstract

Connecting social engagement to architecture entails particular associations, but despite its frequent use, the meaning of socially engaged architecture and social engagement in architecture remains ambiguous. Hence, it is important to ask what exactly professionals and researchers mean when talking about 'social engagement' and, equally, what is suggested when they talk about 'architecture'. 'Social engagement' is, simultaneously, an activity as it is a theory that is charged with the dynamics of collective versus individual, action versus inaction, community versus isolation, public versus private, resilient versus weak, transformative versus universal, sustainable versus unsustainable, process versus form. It is the fields of design, and in particular the disciplines that focus on the production of space, that have come to deploy social engagement in a variety of ways. The social transformation implicit in Henri Lefebvre's notion of spaces of produced maximal difference—one could also call it the implementation of spaces that support solidarity, mutuality and practices of commoning—though, is a thorny issue.