appropriation and claim for equal rights
MA Architecture, Dissertation, 2018
What is resistance, how does it perform, who is performing it?
What does an occupation of a space mean? What does a female-occupation of a space mean?
What happens to the space itself when being claimed by principles of gender equality?
How is gender conditioned when moving in a public space? Where do the comfort and security, the sense of ownership of a public place come from? What is the historical meaning of ownership and why are women excluded?
How can women get the public space back?
This dissertation does not want to advocate a definition of resistance, but instead seeks to understand the spatial expression of conflict and the claiming of a certain set of values against a bigger established system. It will do this by focussing especially on the case of feminist fight against political, economic, social injustice that is produced by patriarchal power and global capitalism.
Several studies are now focusing on how marginalised populations are engaging in the transformation of cities, interesting the disciplines of architecture and urban design through showing the public response to repressive types of urban planning. Women are appropriating public squares, buildings and other sites that symbolise their exclusion from the public realm.
This appropriation happens in different ways, be it a large mass demonstration, the occupation of a prison or a quiet assembly. They do this to affect a change in the public realm of the city for it to be meeting real equality criteria.
“Feminism, in its fullest meaning, enjoins the human race to establish zones of liberation, and literally to reshape the territorial definition of our patriarchal world, along with the social identities and injustices that those boundaries have defined for all of us”.
The research is mainly based on bibliography studies and personal observations. The main aim is to create a series of manifestoes, mixing different media and forms of artistic expression, as poetry, drawing and graphic design; this to go along with a series of pamphlets relating to each other. These will deal with different themes, that concur to explain the thesis. The manifestoes will come in the form of posters, that connected and unfolded, will be able to practically occupy a space and be read all together.